Systems Atlas
In Progress

Systems Atlas: Search Engineering Guide

A comprehensive field guide to building production-grade search systems. From the bits of an Inverted Index to the architecture of Distributed Retrieval.


What We Cover

Foundations

How data is actually stored. Doc Values, BKD Trees, and why "Text" is expensive.

Indexing

The write path. Analysis chains, tokenizers, and handling high-throughput ingestion.

Retrieval

The read path. Recall vs Precision, BM25, and query expansion strategies.

Architecture

Sharding, replication, caching policies, and designing for P99 latency.

Machine Learning

Learning to Rank (LTR), vector search (HNSW), and embedding models.

Operations

Evaluation metrics (NDCG), zero-result debugging, and capacity planning.