Agents turn simple keyword search into compelling search experiences
13 comments
·September 23, 2025OhMeadhbh
softwaredoug
Author here, well specifically I'm using "experiences" to mean basically ranking / finding relevant results.
soco
Wouldn't the "dumb API search" be already enough for users? I'm not sure my decades experience as Google search user has improved once they leaned heavy on the ranking and adding "relevant" things...
nottorp
Well, at least you didn't use 'engagement'.
Edit: oops, you used it in another comment on here.
jillesvangurp
Interesting approach. It might be helpful to give the agent more tools though. Some simple aggregations might give it a notion of what's there to query for in the catalog. And a combination of overly broad queries and aggregations (terms, significant terms, etc.) might help it zoom in on interesting results. And of course, relatively large responses are not necessarily as much of a problem for LLMs as they would be for humans.
dsr_
"Agents, however, come with the ability to reason."
Citations needed. Calling recursive bullshit reason does not make it so.
softwaredoug
Well call it what you want, I'm referring to the reasoning functionality of GPT-5, Claude, etc. It seems to work pretty well at this task. These tools prefer grep to some fancy search thingy.
esafak
> These tools prefer grep to some fancy search thingy.
Passing on the cost to you. The fancy search thingy could navigate the AST and catch typos.
softwaredoug
It's more accurate to say the agents like simple, interpretable tools. Clear input / obvious output. That might be more an AST thing, keyword search, search with very straightforward filters, etc.
I don't thing they do well with search that is built for human engagement, which is a more complex tool to reason about.
the_snooze
If agents are making value judgments ostensibly on my behalf, why should I trust them to continue to be aligned with my values if in practice they're almost always running on someone else's hardware and being maintained on someone else's budget?
We'd be stupid to ignore the last 15+ years of big tech "democratization"-to-enshittification bait-and-switch.
softwaredoug
Search engines currently do this for better or worse. But they still want you to buy products.
The bigger issue is I’m not sure agents are trained to understand what users find engaging. What makes users click.
null
These people really mis-understand how people like me use search. I don't want "an experience," I want a list of documents that match the search specifier.