System Design Card 408 — Search and Indexing / Structure
Concern
Search requirements often demand specialized indexing and denormalized views beyond the source-of-truth store. Product search, document search, and feed discovery differ materially from point-lookup workloads.
What Structure means for this concern
In BASIC, the Structure step is where you turn the chosen trade-offs into a clear high-level architecture and request flow. For Search and Indexing, that means the candidate should make this concern visible at the right moment instead of bolting it on at the end.
Design move
A good move is to make the plan visible before full execution. Tie the concern back to the user flow, the workload, and the dominant trade-off. That keeps the design grounded and makes it easier for the interviewer to follow why a cache, queue, replica, partition, or rate limiter is actually necessary.
Common miss
The miss is assuming primary storage can answer full-text or ranking queries efficiently enough on its own. BASIC helps because the staged flow keeps this concern proportional to the prompt and connected to the rest of the architecture.
BASIC prompt
“When I reach the Structure stage, how does Search and Indexing change the architecture, the trade-offs, or the review checklist?”