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Clarify requirements before you design — kept separate from your stage notes.

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Distributed Search System Design

Visual Problem Diagram

Scenario

Product catalog reindexes every night but shoppers expect findability within minutes of a new SKU—distributed inverted indexes, shard routing, and incremental updates beat one giant Elasticsearch on a single machine story.

Design a distributed search system for large document or product catalogs with full-text search, filters, and ranking. Focus on sharded inverted indexes and query coordination, not a single-node demo.

You should support indexing pipeline, search API, facets, and relevance ranking. Be ready to explain scatter-gather and incremental indexing.

Constraints

Functional

Index documents, full-text search, filters/facets, ranking, snippets, delete/update docs

Non-functional

< 200 ms p95 search, near-real-time indexing minutes, 99.9% availability

Scale

Billions documents, 10K QPS search, TB index size, hundreds of shards

Stages ahead

1Requirement Analysis

2API Design

3High-Level Design

4HLD Extensions

5Trade-offs

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