Best books on Search
📅 Published: • Thomas Queste
Short list of books about Search that greatly helped me build our ecommerce Search engine.
TL;DR
- Elasticsearch In Action (2nd ed. 2023) to learn the tech
- Relevant Search (2016) to be relevant
- AI-Powered Search (2024) to be smart
- Deep Learning For Search (2019) as a bonus
Elasticsearch In Action, by Madhusudhan Konda, 2023
Learn the tech: manipulating data, searching, scaling, performance, administration.
It is an easy read for a complex solution that is Elasticsearch.
Really useful because the documentation of Elasticsearch is a reference, not a tutorial. You are not guided.
I also did the Elastic Certified Engineer training, and did the certification 🥇, this also helped alot.
Relevant Search, by Doug Turnbull, John Berryman, 2016
We enter the territory of Search: being Relevant, building an ecommerce Search from the suggestions to function scores.
What I learnt:
- Where does the business fit, and how to organize a Search team, where feedback is really what matters
- The problems of multi-field search (“albino elephant”)
- Fixing something to break another (“whac-a-mole”)
- Searching exactly (the “sentinel” trick)
🤩 Excellent book!
AI-Powered Search, by Trey Grainger, Doug Turnbull, Max Irwin, 2024
This book explores many concepts about Search, and implements them.
Each chapter is a kind of exploration of a topic, giving the code to follow along.
For example:
- Generating a Knowledge-graph
- Learning to Rank
- Semantic search with vectors
We did use it to better our ranking, with huge success (millions of revenu per month).
⭐ Wonderful book and we consistently dig into it
Deep Learning For Search, by Tommaso Teofili, 2019
I bought that one too early in the path of building our Search engine, and it totally went above my head.
The topics were too much advanced, required too much knowledge of neural network for myself at that time. I included it here because it has some interesting chapters not covered elsewhere.
And this book predates AI-Powered Search by a few years.
Some chapters:
- Expanding query to generate better queries
- Embeddings (in 2019!)
- Multi-language search
- (many more…)
Conclusion
From the list above, if only one should be read, this would be Relevant Search.
It is a really good book that shines because it addresses the Business part of the job: how to organize, how to succeed.
We had a lot of fun with AI-Powered Search, and it helped us improve our Ranking system. I hope we will do more of it!