Harlan D. Harris
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  • Search Describes Solutions -- But What About Problems?

    calendar Jun 23, 2026 · 7 min read · search ux product design e-commerce  ·
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    I previously said that Search User Interfaces (UI) have two jobs -- helping people find things, and educating them about the structure and contents of the data or catalog they're searching through. (I'll use "catalog" here under the assumption that I'm describing an e-commerce search system, but much of this …


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  • Design Decisions for a New Search Results Page

    calendar May 8, 2026 · 6 min read · search ux product e-commerce  ·
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    One of my specialties as a freelance consultant is discovery systems for e-commerce -- web pages and backend systems for helping users search for and find what they want or need. For the last year and a half, I've been working as a consultant for DesignShop, a company that sells materials samples for home renovations. …


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  • You Don't Need a Search Engineer; You Need a Search Scientist

    calendar Apr 13, 2026 · 5 min read · search product data-science management  ·
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    Say you're an Engineering Manager or a Product Manager, responsible for a business-critical search system on a website. Maybe e-commerce, maybe a marketplace, maybe something else. Search is sort of working, it doesn't crash, and it's fast, but there's a feeling that "search isn't great", and you've been …


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  • A Collaborative Template for A/B Tests

    calendar Oct 12, 2023 · 9 min read · a/b testing product data science  ·
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    As I've written about before, as a data scientist supporting a product or marketing team with A/B testing, the job is communication -- helping to translate between business requirements and what we can learn from statistics. I (and many, many others) have found that there is a lot of value in having a document, shared …


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  • Are LLMs a simple solution? And if so, for what problems?

    calendar Sep 14, 2023 · 5 min read · llms simplicity machine learning product  ·
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    The other day, I was reading a post by Venkatash Rao (thousands of words of under-edited brilliance, as usual), and was struck by this note about the complexity of climate solutions: I tend to take as an article of faith the systems science rule of thumb that the complexity of solutions generally matches the complexity …


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Featured Posts

  • A Big Win from a Small Search UI Change and a Predictive Model
  • IZE - Revisiting a hierarchical search technology from the PC era
  • How Search and AI Product Teams are Different
  • Post Query Refinement Suggestions in Search UX, and an Algolia Demo App
  • Use LLMs for Translation and Fallible Reasoning
  • Vibe-Coding the Missing Algolia Comparison Dashboard
  • AI-Assisted Coding, Side Projects, and Donationware
  • A Collaborative Template for A/B Tests

Recent Posts

  • A Big Win from a Small Search UI Change and a Predictive Model
  • One More Minute: A Pebble Count-Up Timer with Roman Numeral Vibrations
  • Design Decisions for a New Search Results Page
  • Introducing Almost Five, a New-ish Pebble Watchface
  • Are Black Holes the Answer to Dark Matter and Dark Energy?
  • You Don't Need a Search Engineer; You Need a Search Scientist
  • Nine Things I Learned Building a Scrabble App for My Friends
  • IZE meets AI -- semantic search, smarter labels, and agentic orientation

Categories

PROFESSIONAL 59 PERSONAL 16

Tags

DATA-SCIENCE 26 R 14 SEARCH 13 ANALYTICS 12 MACHINE-LEARNING 9 STATISTICS 9 CONFERENCES 7 A/B-TESTING 6 AI 6 IZE 6 LLMS 6 OPERATIONS-RESEARCH 6 PROGRAMMING 6 BUSINESS 5
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A/B-TESTING6 AB-TESTING1 ADVERTISING2 AI6 ALGOLIA3 ALGORITHMS4 ANALYTICS12 BIKESHARE1 BLUETOOTH1 BUSINESS5 CIVIC-HACKING1 CODING1 COGNITIVE-SCIENCE1 COMPUTER-SCIENCE1 CONFERENCES7 CONSCIOUSNESS1 COOKING1 COOKING-CLUB2 COSMOLOGY1 CSA3 DATA1 DATA-SCIENCE26 DATAVIZ2 DESIGN3 DESSERT1 DONATIONWARE1 E-COMMERCE2 ETHICS2 FOOD2 GADGETS3 GGPLOT23 GRAPHICS3 HACKATHON2 HISTORY5 HOUSING1 INTERNET2 IZE6 JOB-TITLES4 JOURNALISM2 LISTICLE1 LLMS6 MACHINE-LEARNING9 MANAGEMENT5 MARKETING2 MEDIA1 MEETUP5 META4 MICROECONOMICS1 MONEY1 MP31 OPEN-DATA1 OPERATIONS-RESEARCH6 OPTIMIZATION1 PEBBLE2 PHONES1 PHYSICS1 PREDICTIVE2 PREDICTIVE-MODEL1 PRODUCT5 PRODUCT-DESIGN1 PROGRAMMING6 R14 RECIPES4 REPORTING1 SCALING1 SEARCH13 SHINY2 SIDE-PROJECTS2 SIMPLICITY1 SMARTPHONES2 SMARTWATCH2 SMARTWATCHES1 SOFTWARE1 SOFTWARE-ARCHITECTURE3 SOFTWARE-ENGINEERING3 STATISTICS9 SURVEY2 TEACHING1 TECHNOLOGY2 TELEVISIONS1 TIMER1 UI-INTEGRATION1 UX4 VIBE-CODING1 VIBECODING1 VIDEO1 VISUALIZATION2 WASHINGTON-DC1 WATCHFACE1 WRITING1
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Harlan D. Harris

Copyright 2009-  HARLAN D. HARRIS. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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