Second Week of Beta: Speed
2 min readKey Updates
Search Speed Overhaul Speed has been an issue with this search engine from the beginning. While I do still plan on a large technical overhaul later this year, it was clear that something more immediate needed to be done.
So now I render the search response earlier in the pipeline, and later cache the remainder of the work. The UI can pull that early but incomplete information, show it to the user, and then get the remainder as it comes available.
The result: Cutting time to first results in half! Now results start to come in at around 1.1 seconds instead of the 2.5 seconds they were averaging before this update. Complete results still take the full 2.5 seconds, but the user experience is greatly improved.
Error Reduction Searches are picking up a bit as the beta test goes on. This has allowed me to find a number of hung or failed searches, debug them, and fix the root cause issue. At the start of the beta we had a 15% error rate (!!!) and now it is less than 4%. By the end of the beta tests it should be far less than 1%, it’s just a matter of finding the more obscure issues.
Usage While usage for both https://searcha.page and https://seek.ninja are both small, I see it increasing day over day. Seek Ninja in particular seems to be gaining some sort of traction.
Thank you to everyone participating in the beta test. It has been a very productive 2 weeks.
Want to help? Keep sending feedback through the in‑page tools or email chief@searcha.co.