Why we rewrote our search from scratch
Our old search worked until it did not. Rebuilding it taught us more about our users than any survey.
By Devin Osei
Search is the part of a product people reach for when they already know what they want. When it fails, it fails loudly, and it erodes trust faster than almost anything else.
Our original search was a thin wrapper around a database query. It was fine for a few hundred records and quietly miserable past a few thousand. Results were slow, ranking was arbitrary, and typos returned nothing at all.
The rewrite forced us to answer a harder question: what does a good result actually mean here? We learned that recency mattered more than we assumed, and that exact title matches should always win over fuzzy body matches.
The lesson was not technical. It was that the shape of your search reveals the shape of how people think about your product, and you cannot design one without understanding the other.