Building a Simple Search Engine That Works

About a decade ago, I was working with a guy who was getting a PhD in search engine design, which I knew/know nothing about.

It was actually a lot of fun to chat with him, because he was so enthusiastic about how searching works and how it can integrate with databases, and he was eager to explain this all to anyone who would listen. I learned a fair amount from him, though admittedly I still don't know much about the intricacies of how search engines work.

Some day, I am going to really go through the guts of Apache Solr and Lucene to understand the internals (like I did for Kafka a few years ago), and maybe I'll finally be competent with it.

People who work on really obscure things love to talk about their work, heck if someone would listen to me I could talk for hours about what I do.

Unfortunately very few people care about the minutia of making a behemoth system work.