Learn to design real machine learning systems with the help of several open-ended machine learning problems.

Become a Machine Learning Engineer

Learn to design real machine learning systems with the help of several open-ended machine learning problems commonly asked during interviews at big tech companies. You will start by identifying the problem statement, understanding scale and latency requirements and defining metrics. Then you will come up with the architecture, select models, gather data and finally execute and evaluate the models offline and online.

Grokking the Machine Learning Interview

# Problem statement

The interviewer has asked you to design a search relevance system for a search engine.





# Clarifying questions
Let's clarify the problem statement by specifying three aspects:  scope, scale, and personalization.

## Problem scope
The interviewer's question is really broad. Your best bet is to avoid ambiguities and ask the interviewer as many questions as you can. This will narrow down your problem space as you are thinking out loud for the best solution.

So, your first question for the interviewer would be something like the following:

_<center>Is it a general search engine like Google or Bing or a specialized search engine like Amazon products search?</center>_

This scoping down of the problem is critical as you dive into finding the solutions. For the sake of this chapter, we will assume that you are working towards finding relevant results using a general search engine like Google search or Bing search, but the techniques and discussion apply to all search engines. 

Finally, the problem statement can be precisely described as:

_<center> Build a generic search engine that returns relevant results for queries like "Richard Nixon", "Programming languages" etc.</center>_

This will require you to build a machine learning system that provides the most relevant results for a search query by ranking them in order of relevance. Therefore, you will be working on the *search ranking problem*.

> 📝 The approach to handle a specialized search engine will be fairly similar.


Look at a problem statement that asks you to design a search relevance system for a search engine.

Problem Statement

Problem statement

Clarifying questions

Problem scope