Two days on a customer-facing search
What a zero-result rate is counting
A metric that looks like a defect count, decomposed. Most of the volume turned out to be demand for products that were never in the catalogue; the slice that really was a search defect came down to one multiplication that could not reach its own cutoff, and then to one suffix that made a place name match nothing at all.
4 posts
Where this stands
- Held to be true
- Most of a zero-result rate is usually not a search defect. Measured properly, the majority of these queries had nothing to find, and the genuine defects were narrow and mechanical: one suffix, one fusion choice, one unescaped character.
- What would break it
- A corpus where the zero-result rate is dominated by retrievable documents the search failed to reach.
- Still open
- Whether the remaining share is worth fixing at all. The demand behind it is real but small, and the same effort spent elsewhere has moved more.
- 1Evals6 min
Eighty-three percent of my zero-result searches had nothing to find
Zero-result searches, decomposed: only a small slice was a search defect. Most of the volume was asking for products that do not exist.
- 2Retrieval10 min
A perfect title match had to be popular to count
Hybrid search ranking where retrieval could contribute at most 0.2030 toward a 0.25 cutoff. An exact title match survived only when the product was also popular enough.
- 3Retrieval6 min
Stripping one suffix fixed a quarter of my dead queries
Query normalization for Korean search: a place name plus a station suffix matches nothing. Retrying without the suffix cut zero results from 29.6% to 5.4%.
- 4Retrieval4 min
The error said no such column, and the column was a fragment of a user's query
SQLite FTS5 "no such column" from a pasted HTML tag: parameter binding stopped SQL injection but not the query language underneath, which parsed the bound value a second time.