Search Is the Interface: Semantic Search and RAG with Olivier Dobberkau

Well, we titled the show today, Search is the Interface, which can provoke a lot of interesting thoughts.

But maybe give us your take on that and why that's resonating as a phrase and how that kind of calibrates into how we're approaching search in the industry.

yeah i i think search is something quite very human right it is something that is in our dna or in our way to survive right if we go back to the caveman times um hunting and searching for food is something that that that uh keeps you alive, right? So many, many years ago, I heard a very good, you know, very good establishment of what search is.

And actually, people started to also to speak about the scent of search, actually know that you could smell search, like, you know, when is a search good? Because people, you know, at the end, you know, if you let's go back to maybe a bear, That's something that happens to be in Canada, for example.

You know, the bear knows exactly where to find the food that he's craving for, right? If he wants to eat berries, he knows where the berries are.

But this is something that has happened.

They know because they're smelling it maybe, but also because they're remembering the places that they have been.

So if you would, let's say, compare the search of a human on a website, then this human visiting the website is always expecting the search to behave like something that he has experienced before right so this is my first hypothesis i think you're um also remembering jacob nielsen who said um we should all do things that are coping to the expectation of people right we should never surprise people let's say with a super duper interface I remember when we started to do web design is that we experimented a lot, you know, on, you know,

concepts.

And

I don't know if you have been around with AOL

dial-ups.

There was like a thing called eWorld from Apple many, many years ago.

You will dial up and you end up like in a virtual world.

city and i think remembering the very first inter websites that we did was they were quite playful because we we had to do also we like we had to to you know to to have like a house and have a like a post office and stuff like this where people could like actually find their mail so i think at that time um the interfaces became something like kind of you know um you know how to call it um

You had to present something that they could

relate to.

Nowadays, I think interfaces have become more and more abstract.

We are seeing that the hamburger is there so people understand, okay, this is navigation on the mobile phone.

We know the L navigation with the top navigational points and the sub-navigation, and people do understand this pretty well.

And they see a search field and they see a search button.

They enter keywords.

And with that, they find stuff on the website or not.

If you have a good search engine, you will run into re-rankings and you run into like, okay, how much times the keyword is in the actual document.

There's algorithms called like BM25 that do a lot of re-ranking and sorting and relevance and so on and so on.