In the previous post in this series, I discussed the technical details of IZE and its reception. Here I want to look at what came after — and where IZE-like ideas might still have potential.

The short version: IZE was forgotten, but the ideas it embodied — hierarchical clustering, single-word splits, dynamic navigation …

In the first post in this series, I introduced IZE -- a DOS-era personal information manager with a novel approach to search and navigation. Here I want to go deeper into how it actually worked, what its limits were, and how it was received at the time.

The algorithm

The core of IZE was patented by Paul Kleinberger …

Sometimes revisiting old technology is the best way to understand how we got where we are -- and to see what alternative paths might have looked like. This is the first in a series of posts about IZE, a DOS-era personal information manager that I think has some interesting lessons for modern search and discovery.

I'll …

I've supported A/B testing of Algolia search systems at three companies now, and have dived deep into A/B testing generally as well as specifically for search. The Algolia documentation on search A/B testing is technically adequate for getting started, and the dashboard has improved, but there are still many ways that …

Engineering leadership knows the standard playbook for product teams: the Product Trio, the Spotify model, outcome-based roadmaps, and so on. I've seen teams adopt these practices and still struggle when they add responsibility for advanced algorithms -- search, recommendations, predictive modeling, or generative AI -- …

If AI helps me get ideas from my head to the readers' heads faster, that's good. Society thrives when ideas are shared, critiqued, and built on. But authors shouldn't take credit for other peoples' ideas -- they should synthesize others' ideas, including the "blurry JPG of the web" that is LLMs. The question …

What are Post-Query Refinement Suggestions?

One of my favorite search UX patterns is post-query refinement suggestions — buttons that appear between the search box and results, adjusting the query in various ways. See, for instance, these suggestions on Etsy, which recommend that I filter by shipping speed, seller …

I keep seeing AI skeptic takes like "AI is useless" or "LLMs are only good at Natural Language Processing", usually because of hallucinations and AI slop. Both are real problems. But that conclusion still misses the point: it misidentifies what LLMs are actually good at.

My take is: LLMs are great …

Algolia is a tremendously powerful search platform, especially for e-commerce. But like most SaaS tools, the management dashboard doesn't do everything you need it to do. In particular, it's hard to compare search result rankings across variations in indexes -- a super common pattern when you're testing and iterating …

The rise of AI-assisted coding tools has made it dramatically easier and faster to build small side projects than ever before. What used to take weeks of evenings and weekends can now be done in a few focused sessions, with an AI pair programmer handling much of the boilerplate, debugging, and implementation details. …