The amount of tweaking needed to make a search engine work well can't be overstated either. When you start out, it's inevitably going to be kinda shit. That's fine. Now you need to draw the rest of the owl.
Yeah, I agree. I was certainly underwhelmed with my first small search engine. It was so bad even I didn't want to use it - and I had spent months and months on it.
Still, most projects aren't a search engine. I see people put high expectations on how things will go and often it's just really hard to realize some of those hopes.
Sometimes you just have to take what you can get and iterate. Don't give up.
I think, with search engines, it's best to work with them for the problem domain. It is a fractal of interesting programming problems touching upon pretty much every area of CS, programming and programming-adjacent topics, and take whatever comes out of it as an unexpected bonus.
Well said, my next version will be focused on a niche I actually need instead of general search. Still, I haven't finished studying the CS books + 47 algorithms I'll need to actually implement it.
Still, most projects aren't a search engine. I see people put high expectations on how things will go and often it's just really hard to realize some of those hopes.
Sometimes you just have to take what you can get and iterate. Don't give up.