Part 2/12:
Search technology has been evolving over four decades, beginning with fundamental exact and range searches. These methods are often employed in traditional databases and underpin many everyday applications, such as online shopping.
For instance, when a user searches for a shirt on an eCommerce platform, they might filter results based on specific attributes like brand and price range. Underlying this functionality are secondary indexes that constrain a vast search space into manageable results. The emphasis here is on performance: instant retrieval of precise or range-matched items.
Examples include searching for a product in a specific category with a price less than a certain amount, which are straightforward to implement with secondary indexes.