Design Search Ranking

Frame the Problem: The Query Changes Everything

The question: "Design search for an e-commerce site." Other search products share this structure, but their relevance signals and constraints differ.

It is the funnel from the last two lessons again, but one new input reshapes it: the query.

Recommendations infer interests from context and history. Search adds a query that expresses the user's current goal, although it can be incomplete or ambiguous.

The query affects data processing, retrieval, ranking, and evaluation.

So the system has three jobs, in this order