Search is a critical piece of infrastructure at just about any based company that deals with data. At large companies, it makes a lot of sense to centralize and build a platform for different teams and customers. Such a platform directly translates to saving development time, avoiding reinventing the wheel, and better maintainability, all of which lead to cost-savings.

While it is a complex problem, spanning a challenging landscape, building a search platform gets even more challenging when you try and cater to the diverse set of users that come with it. The varying requirements in terms of feature set, scale, security, etc. are a few complexities that require deep understanding and thought when designing a search platform that would support varying use-cases.  Proactively thinking about the requirements, priorities, and overall design help ensure better availability and maintainability of a search platform.

Having built search platforms at both, large and small organizations in the past, I realized that there are more than a few key questions that should be addressed, if not answered when starting to build the platform. Addressing these questions helps starting off the project on the right foot and allow for a platform that is easier to manage and extend in the future. From security to scalability, and beyond, this talk would highlight the questions that I feel should be addressed when starting to build a search platform. At the end, the attendees of the talk would have a much better understanding of the important aspects about designing a search platform.