Top 4 Search Interview Questions

Browse 4 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Search. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.

Related Topics:Backtracking Recursion Pruning Relevance Ranking

Count the ways to place N queens on an N by N board so that no two attack each other.

One queen per row is forced, so search row by row and keep sets of used columns, used sums and used differences to reject a conflict before recursing. The anti-diagonal is the row plus column and the main diagonal the row minus column, and that difference must be shifted into range, not reduced with an absolute value.

hardcoding

Design search over a catalogue of fifty million products. How is the index built, how are results ranked, and how does the index stay fresh?

An inverted index maps terms to posting lists, built by an analysis chain that must run identically over documents and queries, ranked by BM25 plus business signals, and fed by a change stream of denormalised documents with reindexing behind an alias treated as routine.

harddesign

Site search converts poorly. How would you improve relevance when conversion is the metric you are judged on?

Segment the query log first, then blend textual match with behavioural and business signals into a ranking you can explain, treat synonyms and merchandising overrides as owned content with expiry, and handle zero results as a designed page - while guarding against the click feedback loop.

harddesign

Where would you start if you were handed a retailer's search and told to improve it?

With the zero-result queries, sorted by volume. Each one is a customer stating exactly what they wanted and being refused, the causes are mundane and fixable, and it is the only part of relevance work where you know for certain the current behaviour is wrong.

mediumscenario