[marginalia_nu]

> I have so far mostly failed in trying to explain 1/ why search matters and 2/ that not all "search" functionality are equal and that building good search is an art form.

Yeah, it takes an absurd amount of tuning to make search work well. Given how poorly the average search field works in almost anything, it's fair to say this crucial step isn't happening.

I suspect a lot of organizations just don't have workflows that would tolerate someone spending a month tweaking search algorithm parameters. It doesn't look enough like work.

[andai]

Doesn't look like work, yet tragically, incremental improvements to "frictionlessness" represent order-of-magnitude improvements to user experience.

[marginalia_nu]

Oh yeah, it's definitely an organizational problem that's pretty widespread. I think it boils down to a general lack of trust, and a willingness to turn developers into a sort of assembly line workers.

[PaulHoule]

I went through a phase where I spoke to people who develop numerous enterprise search engines (e.g. OpenText) out of about 20 interviews I think I found one that did actual evaluation work on their search engine. The rest of them figured it was more important to have 300+ 'integrations' to various data sources and didn't think the relevance of the results was much of a selling point.

[_ea1k]

Quality is harder to sell to enterprise customers when compared to feature lists. You have to check the right boxes and entertain the right ears to sell.

Being more useful than the others isn't as easy to quantify.