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Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

I had the pleasure of working with two of these. They did not give you the same quality of results that Google's website did. Utter garbage in a blue rack mounted case.

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One thing I've heard from multiple googlers is that their internal wiki search is crap exactly because there's limited hyperlinking to give a good ranking for pages. Google's algorithm basically crunches a lot of human provided data (inbound links, clicks, dwell, etc.) into an algorithmic score, but with limited data it's not much better than tf-idf.

That's probably the same thing that you've encountered with the search appliance.

What is tf-idf, if you don’t mind me asking

It's a search scoring algorithm, combining how frequently the search term is used in a document with how frequently it appears in other documents.

A word that shows up in the document and no others means it gets a very high score, vs "and" shows up in every document and thus doesn't score well for any

https://lmgtfy.app/?q=tf+idf

Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency.

It's what Apache Lucene does which is what ElasticSearch uses under the hood.

Pretty much. Internal search at Google actually used these appliances for a long time. Fortunately it's still been evolved and was externalised as a Google Cloud product a few years back.

I think you might have to change your "is" to a "was". wiki isn't really used anymore and the internal search is really really good.

You guys don't use a wiki anymore? What replaced it?

Seems some form of wiki always has value inside a company?

There's a ton of different forms of documentation within Google, but mainly Google Docs or markdown.

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