#search
12 articles
Design a GraphRAG System (Knowledge-Graph-Augmented Retrieval)
When vector RAG fails on multi-hop and corpus-wide questions, build a GraphRAG knowledge graph: entity extraction, Leiden communities, map-reduce global search.
Design a Feature Store
Serve identical feature values to model training and online inference, eliminating training-serving skew at sub-10ms latency and millions of reads per second.
Design an Intelligent Document Processing Pipeline
Design a pipeline that turns millions of messy PDFs into validated structured JSON: OCR, LLM extraction, confidence routing, and build-vs-buy cost math.
Design an AI Coding Assistant (Copilot / Cursor)
Design an AI coding assistant: sub-200ms ghost-text completions plus an autonomous multi-file agent — the two-product architecture behind Copilot and Cursor.
Design a Vector Database / Semantic Search Service
Index 1 billion 768-dimensional vectors and answer top-k similarity queries in under 20 ms — the ANN indexing, sharding, and filtering architecture behind Pinecone, Weaviate, and pgvector.
Design a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Pipeline
Design a RAG pipeline that grounds an LLM in 10M documents with sub-2-second, cited answers: ingestion, hybrid retrieval, reranking, generation, and eval.
Design a Centralized Log Aggregation System (ELK / Splunk)
Collect, store, and search logs from thousands of services. Collection agents, a buffered ingestion pipeline, time-based inverted indices, hot-warm-cold tiers, and cost control.
Design a Distributed Search Engine (Elasticsearch)
Index billions of documents and answer full-text queries in milliseconds. Inverted indexes, sharding + replication, scatter-gather, and relevance scoring.
Design an Email Service (Gmail)
Send, receive, store, and search email for hundreds of millions of users. SMTP ingestion, sharded mailbox storage, full-text search, and spam filtering.
Design a Hotel / Airbnb Booking System
Search available listings and book date ranges without double-booking. Availability as a range problem, reservation holds, and the search vs transaction split.
Design Yelp / Nearby Search (proximity service)
Find restaurants/businesses near a location, fast. Geohash, quadtree, hexagonal cells, and the right index for "within 5 km of me".
Design Search Autocomplete (Typeahead)
Sub-100ms autocomplete suggestions across billions of queries — tries, top-k caching, and personalized ranking.