System Design
Search & Indexing
6 practice questions. Free questions open a full answer guide; the rest unlock with Pro.
- Users of your search feature complain that a query they ran twice returns slightly different result counts, and that a product they just edited took a few seconds to show up. How do you explain these behaviors and decide which ones are acceptable to leave as-is?
- Design the backend for full-text search over a large, constantly-changing document corpus — think a help center or a code search tool — where users expect both relevant ranking and to find a document shortly after it's published.Go Pro
- Walk me through how you'd build search over a product catalog so users can find items by free-text queries across name, description, and tags. Why not just use SQL LIKE?Go Pro
- Design the search backend for a large product catalog so users get fast, relevant full-text results. Walk me through the index structure, how a newly updated product becomes searchable, and how you keep the search index in sync with the source-of-truth database.Go Pro
- Design a search autocomplete feature (typeahead) for a platform with 500 million queries per day.Go Pro
- Design a search-as-you-type autocomplete that suggests queries as a user types into a search box, returning results in under about 100ms. How would you make it that fast?Go Pro
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