Almost all web sites that allow searches have a functionality called "Advanced Search". You clicked on it a form with all searchable fields pop up; you filled in search terms into the fields you would like to search against, hit the "search" button, a more refined copy of results pops up. Sounds like "advanced", right?

However, 99% of the times the users actually use is just the single search bar, which is called "Basic Search" by many. "Basic Search" isn't really "basic". It needs to break down search phrases, search against all possible fields, calculate scores, and add them up. It also has to consider "fuzziness", trade-off between precision and recall, words stemming, phonetic, term frequency, weighting factor ... so on and so forth.

In this presentation, Wenbo is going to explain why a single search bar is the much more advanced way of search. With real world examples from building Sift -- a people/directory search engine, Wenbo will walk you through all the critical components in delivering accurate search results.