Product Data for Search — a Comedian’s Approach

Product data quality is always crucial for search. When I joined my last workplace as a Search Product Owner, at the beginning, we had a combination of bad data, bad retrieval and bad ranking. We fixed retrieval and ranking and also had some improvements in product data, but fixing manually all the products was impossible, so we needed lots of adjustments in our engine to have a decent search. We could have reached better results much faster with good data.

This reminds me to the stand-up of our Hungarian comedian, Uncle Steve Besenyő about stupidness, including a part about oil refineries (hint: in Hungarian fine and tastes good are the same words):

“I will tell you what is stupid. Oil refinery, please?! They won’t succeed with it. I know that they are building a factory, a big huge factory and they say that it is oil refinery. And there go lots of tubes here and there in the factory, the oil flows sadly in the tubes. I admit, that it is getting finer and finer and finer, but what comes out at the end is still not too fine. They won’t succeed. But why did they start with something so not fine?! With crude oil?!?! Crude oil?! That is very bad. Why didn’t they start with something, what is almost fine? For example, potatoes. They don’t need such a big factory, they should just put it into a pot, cook it and it is already fine. Are they sane?!”

So, whenever you have some influence on product data, think what do you want: to build a huge factory for crude oil and have something imperfect at the end or start with potatoes and need only a pot to have good results?