What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
Yeah, so, small problem. Nothing huge really (never a good sign when they say that). Well, we’re in the middle of the Panny D and if you search for cough on our website, depending on the day of week and time of day, COVID appears somewhere near the bottom of the 4th page or near the top of the 5th page of results. Oh, and people are coming to our site from Google, then going back out to Google and coming back in again. #awkward 😬
So, new search engine then, yeah?
I’ve been at this technology game for a few years, almost 30 if you really want the numbers. So I’ve worked with a lot of truly shite tech, and even worse tech companies. You know the kind, with the morals of a human trafficker and the income of a small country.
Not the search platform that won the contract. So big ups to Algolia who not only have a product that actually does what it’s supposed to, but they’re a bunch of amazing humans who work there.
I led the implementation of the search engine, then worked on the operationalisation of it.
Implementation went well. Operationalisation, not so much. Turns out I was too spicy, too burned out and far too expendable.
Either way, for 12 months I had great fun learning and playing with data in a search engine.
I could see the Omicron variant happening about 2 weeks before everyone else caught on to it. Also regional outbreaks of norovirus and measles.
Oh, and search for symptoms of the 'rona and you’d find what you were looking for at the top of page one of the results.
Accuracy of search results went from 30 - 60% to around 95%.
We stopped people from using Google as the navigation method. Which is helpful when there’s a boat load of misinformation out there.
What I liked about this
Honestly, helping to save lives boosted my ego a little bit.
I loved being in the data and seeing things happening before anyone else was because search data is beautiful (when used responsibly).