Synopsis: Poor Man’s Search Engine
Explore the Poor Man’s Search Engine antipattern in SQL and understand why basic keyword searches within text data are inefficient and inaccurate. Learn the limitations of substring matching in SQL and discover when this simple approach is acceptable. This lesson helps you recognize the drawbacks of naive text search and prepares you for more advanced, optimized search techniques using specialized tools.
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I was working in a technical support job in 1995, at a time when companies were just starting to adopt the Web as a way to provide information to their customers. We had a collection of short documents describing solutions to common support questions, and we wanted to put them on the Web in a knowledge base application.
As the collection grew, I quickly realized that it needed to be searchable because customers didn’t want to browse through hundreds of articles to find what they were looking for. One strategy would be to organize the articles into categories, but even these were too large, and many articles belonged in multiple ...