When a Search Health Check Pays Off

01

Search “works,” but no one can tell you how good it actually is — or where it’s leaking revenue and trust

02

You’re about to invest in search, relevance, or AI and need to know what you’re building on before you commit

03

The same relevance, ranking, scaling, or cost problems keep recurring, and your team can’t pinpoint the root cause

If search is core to your product or your operations, you are making consequential decisions on top of it every day — what to build next, what to buy, where relevance is costing you conversions or hours, and whether the architecture will hold as you scale. A search health check gives you an independent, expert read on all of it before you commit budget or engineering time to the wrong fix.

This is a fixed-scope search audit run alongside your engineering, product, and leadership teams. We review what matters for your system — and not every system needs every area — then deliver a written report with prioritized, actionable recommendations and a readout with your team.

Search is at the center of what we do. The review is led by Grant Ingersoll — co-founder and former CTO of Lucidworks, a core Apache Lucene and Solr committer, OpenSearch contributor, and author of Taming Text. For deep relevance and search-quality work, we bring in Daniel Tunkelang — founding Chief Scientist at Endeca, former Director of Search at LinkedIn, and author of Faceted Search. Few teams anywhere can put that depth on your search problem.

Two tiers, one fixed price

Most engagements start with the Search Health Check — strategy, architecture, implementation, and operations, with a relevance best-practices review. When relevance and ranking quality are key to the product — when customers feel the difference between a good result and a bad one — the Search Health Check + Relevance tier adds a comprehensive, measurable search relevance audit: evaluation, retrieval, ranking, query and content understanding, and result presentation.

Both are fixed-scope and fixed-price, with a written deliverable and a findings readout. Use the form below to tell us about your search system and where it hurts, and we will scope the right tier and confirm a price.

What We Review

Search strategy review icon
Product & Search Strategy

User experience, querying, discovery tools, analytics, and the roadmap — including where AI can unlock more value for your users and your business.

Search architecture review icon
Architecture

Application design, integration points, API use, sizing and topology, custom plugins, and sharding and scaling strategy.

Search implementation review icon
Implementation

Indexing and ETL, query understanding and optimization, faceting and aggregation, plus configs, schemas, and system/JVM settings.

Production operations review icon
Production Operations

Security and access control, monitoring and cost controls, disaster recovery and failover, and scaling mechanisms.

Relevance and search quality review icon
Relevance & Search Quality

Evaluation, retrieval, ranking, query and content understanding, and result presentation — the deep-dive in the Relevance tier.

AI search review icon
AI Search

Hybrid and semantic retrieval, embeddings and vector search, RAG pipelines, and agentic search — assessed for accuracy, latency, and cost.

Choose Your Scope

Two fixed-scope tiers. Both include a written deliverable and a findings readout with your team.

Standard

Search Health Check

Price on request

Your search works, but you can’t say how well — or where it’s costing you. Get an expert read on strategy, architecture, and implementation.

  • Product management & search strategy review
  • Architecture review — topology, scaling, integration, custom plugins
  • Implementation review — indexing, query understanding, faceting, configuration
  • Production operations — security, monitoring, cost, failover
  • Relevance best-practices review
  • Written report (or slide-deck option) with prioritized recommendations
  • Findings readout with your team
Book a Discovery Call

Fast turnaround. Written deliverable. Findings readout with Q&A. Fixed price on request.

Search Health Check — FAQ

Common questions from product, engineering, and leadership teams evaluating a search audit.

What is a search health check?

A search health check is a fixed-scope expert review of your search application across strategy, architecture, implementation, production operations, and relevance. We work alongside your engineering, product, and leadership teams to find where search is underperforming, why, and what to do about it — delivered as a written report (or slide deck) with prioritized, actionable recommendations. It is a diagnosis, not a sales pitch for a platform migration.

What does a search audit cost?

It is a fixed-scope, fixed-price engagement, scoped to the size and complexity of your system and confirmed in writing before you commit. The comprehensive tier adds a deep search-quality and relevance review. We provide a fixed price on request — book a discovery call and we will scope it on the first conversation.

How long does a search health check take?

Discovery and review are typically completed over a three-week period, depending on your team’s availability and access to systems. A draft written deliverable follows within two weeks of completing the review, and the final version within four weeks. If you have a board, investment, or launch deadline, tell us on the first call and we will tell you whether it is realistic.

Do you cover Solr, Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch?

Yes. Our practitioners have built and committed to the open-source search engines these platforms are built on — Grant Ingersoll is a core Apache Lucene and Solr committer and an OpenSearch contributor. We review Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and the vector, hybrid, and AI search layers built on top of them, as well as managed and commercial search platforms.

What is the difference between the two tiers?

The Search Health Check covers strategy, architecture, implementation, production operations, and a relevance best-practices review. The Search Health Check + Relevance tier includes all of that plus a comprehensive search-quality review — evaluation metrics, retrieval precision and recall, ranking models, query and content understanding, and result presentation. Choose the comprehensive tier when relevance and ranking quality are core to the product experience you are judged on.

What do you need from us to run it?

Access to the search system, its codebase, its logs and analytics, and time with the people who own search — engineering, product, and the relevant operations team. We confirm exactly what we need, and the scope tailored to your application, on the discovery call.

Request a Search Health Check

Tell us about your search system and where it hurts. We will scope the right tier and confirm a fixed price, and get back to you within one business day.