Search has its own bitter lesson
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The real lesson in search isn't about better algorithms — it's about incentivizing content authors to make information findable. Just as Google's PageRank reshaped the web by rewarding authoritative content, coding agents like Claude Code are reshaping developer documentation by creating a feedback loop: when agents fail to find docs, developers frantically improve them. This dynamic outperforms technically sophisticated RAG systems because it programs humans to write better, more structured content. The same principle applies to enterprise search, which historically fails due to no feedback loop between authorship and findability. The key insight: a search engine is a relationship between authors and users, not just a ranking algorithm. Giving content creators real-time feedback and incentives to write useful content beats any reranker or embedding model.
