Chapter 17Poor Man’s Search Engine
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
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.
We quickly realized that as the collection grew, it needed to be searchable, because customers didn’t want to browse through hundreds of articles to find their answers. One strategy would be to organize the articles in categories, but even these groups were ...
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