Design keyword search for social posts

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Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's skills in large-scale system design, information retrieval and indexing, API design, ranking strategies, and handling real-time updates and consistency for search features.

Design keyword search for social posts

Company: Meta

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Design a Facebook-like **post search** feature: - Input: one or more **keywords**. - Output: all (or top-K) posts that **contain** the keyword(s). - Assume posts are created/updated/deleted continuously and the corpus is very large. Define APIs, indexing strategy, ranking, and how you would scale the system. You may assume you can build something similar to an Elasticsearch-style solution (inverted index), but describe the components yourself.

Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's skills in large-scale system design, information retrieval and indexing, API design, ranking strategies, and handling real-time updates and consistency for search features.

Read the full Meta Software Engineer interview experience this question came from

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Oct 2, 2025
mediumSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenSystem Design
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Design a Facebook-like post search feature:

  • Input: one or more keywords .
  • Output: all (or top-K) posts that contain the keyword(s).
  • Assume posts are created/updated/deleted continuously and the corpus is very large.

Define APIs, indexing strategy, ranking, and how you would scale the system. You may assume you can build something similar to an Elasticsearch-style solution (inverted index), but describe the components yourself.

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