Samuel
@samuel.fm
here I was thinking search couldn't possibly get any worse
search for "Paul frazee" - it's a list of random Pauls, Mr Frazee not included 10 2 34
Samuel
Weirdly enough it stops getting new results after “Paul fraz”. To complicate things, Graysky seems to behave like this:
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Samuel
To be clear - Paul’s changed his name so it’s reasonable he’s not coming up. The problem is that search seems to freeze after about 8 characters
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Jaz
We moved actor search to Open search to reduce load on the AppView database but it's definitely got some quirks. It did successfully give us back headroom on those DB replicas and smooth out CPU spikiness but yeah. Probably gonna be a new search backend for actors with follow context next year.
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Jaz
Typeahead is supposedly using 2 and 3 ngram indices based on the display name and handle but it seems to really prefer matching handles only. Without typeahead it searches in the entire profile record which also doesn't feel great, it should prio Handle -> DN -> Bio and have different fuzziness
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Jaz
Current version of search also doesn't know about anything like how many followers someone has or how many posts they've made and has no way to prioritize more active accounts. Lots of room to improve in a custom search service but it requires time/effort we don't have capacity for atm to scale.
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pavedwalden
What if the app cached your following list and the search bar compared against that and prioritized local results over those returned from the backend?
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pavedwalden
Oh that's great! I almost made a joke about how "surely Paul has time to work on this feature I want"
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Jaz
LOL yeah Paul asked me if we could make actor search better and I had to say "probably not without replacing the search backend and probably not until we're running on our own hardware" so he just went and built a stopgap to make it a bit less shit for now. There's just so much going on lmao.
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Jaz
We're like ~9 engineers trying to do 20 things but do them well and on a timeline that allows us to get everything done soon enough to keep users and devs happy, it's definitely hectic but also a lot of fun.
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Jaz
We've got 3 major backend architectural services (PDS, BGS, AppView), 3 apps (web/ios/android), a handful of auxiliary services (search, moderation, Discover, etc.) and all of them need to be scaling 10x every 3 months to handle growth.
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Jaz
Oh yeah and we're building out our own Point of Presence mini-datacenters with our own hardware to be able to scale without cloud costs making things very hard.
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Jaz
Any solution we'd build now we'd want to scale to 100M users which would require a good amount of planning/testing to make sure things like celebrities etc. don't just completely break the scaling of the service. We can do it but it takes time that needs to go into v2 arch right now.
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Jaz
The magic numbers we always use is, imagine a user has millions of posts, has given millions of likes, follows hundreds of thousands of accounts, and is followed by 100M accounts. That's not gonna be every user but that's the extreme of what we need to support.
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Samuel
👍 thanks for the in depth explanation! From what I’ve seen, Paul’s clientside hack seems like it’ll be able to tide things over until you’re able to get to it, whenever that happens
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Daniel 🇪🇺🇺🇦
Glad (sort of) that I'm not the only one thinking this. Not that I found X's search great, but on BlueSky I sometimes struggle to find accounts I KNOW exist.
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Corey James
For me personally- would like to find more content surrounding performance baggers/harleys, more news media, various companies who’s products I use and love, 3D printing content, even some gaming studios would be nice!
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The Doctor (Commissions open)
In terms of companies, there's not a huge influx yet. But I would say for the other things, goodfeeds.com is a great place to look for things The attached card is searching for news media, and the top 2 results are gaming and big news outlets.
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