CouponLooker Updates
Rahul writes about our latest update to CouponLooker. This is our third and its one of the more exciting things to me how quick it is to update and tweak the search algorithm. There are some pretty sophisticated things going on inside the engine but things have been designed with an eye towards flexibility and rapid iteration. I’m sure the equivalent results could be done with an approach that uses half as many CPU cycles, but frankly CPU cycles are relatively cheap now and making rapid improvements are invaluable.
One detail that you won’t see using the service directly is that I’ve put in some A-B logic for our own development purposes. I can put the site into a special mode where whenever it does a search it does it twice using random different permutations of our algorithm. We can then experiment with this in the office or with test subjects and ask people to search for useful things and give the system feedback on which of the result-sets look more useful.