Building a Search Engine Changed How I See the Web

Short summary

A developer building an independent search engine called Slick reflects on how building a crawler and ranking system changed their understanding of the web. The post covers crawling challenges, the limitations of keyword matching, how modern search combines multiple signals including semantic search and ML reranking, and argues that AI complements rather than replaces search because retrieval quality remains fundamental. It advocates for user-controlled ranking and privacy-preserving personalization.

• •Building a search engine reveals the web is messy: pages disappear, JS blocks crawlers, and SEO content pollutes results
• •Modern search combines BM25, semantic search, ML reranking, and quality signals — no single algorithm suffices
• •AI transforms information but still depends on reliable retrieval, making search infrastructure more important, not less

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.