<story><title>Reducing search indexing latency to one second</title><url>https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2020/reducing-search-indexing-latency-to-one-second.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fareesh</author><text>Indexing latency aside, when I search for something on Twitter it shows me results as I type&lt;p&gt;When I tap on the result, there is invariably something else at the tap location&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the terminology for this? Flash of ephemeral search result?&lt;p&gt;Are there any good ways of avoiding this problem?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>capableweb</author><text>This is something that seemingly none of the big platforms or companies get right. Not Twitter, not Microsoft, not Firefox, not Apple, not a single one of them.&lt;p&gt;Seemingly they missed the lesson web developers learned ten years ago that you can&amp;#x27;t change content that the user is currently looking at without any interaction done, unless that&amp;#x27;s to be expected from the user.&lt;p&gt;But auto-loading items in a list is somehow still difficult for these companies to get right. Once you&amp;#x27;re done typing your query in the window&amp;#x27;s start menu, apple&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;quick launcher thing&amp;quot; or twitter&amp;#x27;s search widget, it takes X seconds for the query to actually finish, so while you&amp;#x27;re hovering the menu, it changes content from underneath and the thing you wanted to click on, has been switched to something else.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m starting to wonder if this is on purpose, as seemingly no one is getting this right, but I don&amp;#x27;t understand what metric they are optimizing for (incorrectly) to believing that this behavior is correct.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reducing search indexing latency to one second</title><url>https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2020/reducing-search-indexing-latency-to-one-second.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fareesh</author><text>Indexing latency aside, when I search for something on Twitter it shows me results as I type&lt;p&gt;When I tap on the result, there is invariably something else at the tap location&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the terminology for this? Flash of ephemeral search result?&lt;p&gt;Are there any good ways of avoiding this problem?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>klysm</author><text>This is certainly one of the most frustrating things in modern UIs, although I’m not sure what it’s called I feel like it’s common enough for someone to have coined a name by this point. There are a few ways I can think of to deal with it:&lt;p&gt;1. Have very close to 0 latency. Clearly not always doable.&lt;p&gt;2. When in the process of searching, indicate to the user that the results aren’t fresh and new ones are coming - grey out the current options for instance.&lt;p&gt;3. Analyze how long the new results have been shown for and treat very short durations differently. If the new results have been up for 2ms, it’s not possible for that to be your desired intention.</text></comment>