Product search: build it, or buy it?
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said — including whether you asked who uses it before naming what you would build it with.
The online store's search is a SQL LIKE query and customers complain they cannot find things. A hosted search vendor has quoted a monthly fee; an engineer wants to run an open-source search engine; another says a Postgres full-text index would do. The interviewer asks how you would decide.
React to this
Say what you would question, what you would keep, and what you would need to know first.
Three proposals on the table (illustrative) 1. Hosted search vendor monthly fee; API; "relevance out of the box" 2. Self-hosted search engine 3-node cluster; someone on call for it 3. Postgres full-text index a migration and a query change Current: SELECT ... WHERE name LIKE '%term%' Catalogue: a few hundred products (illustrative) Complaints tagged "can't find": 31 last month Nobody has measured what the complaints have in common.
What it is really testing
Whether the candidate asks the build-versus-buy questions in order — is this core differentiation, can a provider solve it, what does integration cost, what does operating it cost, what happens when the provider fails — rather than arguing from preference.