Search, Analytics and Geo
How search engines rank and measure results, how to summarise huge streams with small structures, and how to answer location questions: ranking maths, sharding, sampling, quantiles, geofences and nearby search.
10 lessons1 h 45 minIntermediate
What you'll learn
0 of 10 lessons complete
Who this is for and what you will be able to do
Who this is for
Engineers who have met the basics of search, analytics and maps and now need to design them for real traffic.
After this course you will be able to
- Explain TF-IDF and BM25 and compute a score by hand
- Design a query pipeline and judge it with precision, recall and NDCG
- Shard a search index and merge results correctly
- Sample streams and estimate percentiles with small, mergeable structures
- Build geofencing and nearby search with the right index at each step
Topics it coversSearchGeospatialDatabase ShardingRedisAll topics
How a lesson works
Interactive diagram
See how each component connects, then run a request through it.
Plain-words toggle
Switch between the technical explanation and a plain-language one.
Practice design
Change a design of your own in the builder and see how it holds up.
Quiz and exercise
Test your understanding before moving on.
Go deeper
These lessons are written from scratch. The books below are excellent next reads.
- Introduction to Information Retrievalby Manning, Raghavan and Schutzefree online textbook behind most search lessons
- Designing Data-Intensive Applicationsby Martin Kleppmannpartitioning and stream processing background
- Elasticsearch: the definitive guide and referenceby Elastichow a production engine exposes these ideas