noHits Searches

A client was seeing increasingly degraded performance of their site. Using Gin, it was discovered that 20% of overall runtime was being spent for a fuzzy searchNoHits method execution. Further investigation showed that 47230 of 52409 search requests in one day were coming from various bots. Gin allowed the client to to review and understand the bot serach behaviour and implemented a solution to skip expensive fuzzy searches being performed where the initial search phrase was generating no results. The fix resulted in a the average server response time reducing from ~400ms to ~200ms:

no hits