Real catalogues are less like neat databases and more like drawers everyone in the house has used.

The H&M catalogue starts politely enough: “Strap top”, black, white, off-white. Then the variants multiply, identical descriptions return in several colours, and one of them becomes “Strap top (1)”. An item is more than a sentence: it is a sentence, a colour, a department, a picture, and a suspiciously similar sibling.

Open Food Facts is messier. It contains millions of products, dozens of languages, community edits, missing categories, unknown food names, incomplete ingredient percentages, and products whose environmental score is essentially shrug emoji-shaped. One tea bag arrives with ciqual_food_name = unknown; another has no nutrition data at all. The database puts the mess in a field and carries on.

That is why a search gateway needs real catalogues, not rows called product-000001. Search has to survive colour variants, multilingual labels, near-duplicate names, missing values, and the occasional tea bag with an identity crisis.

The useful benchmark question is therefore not “which engine sorted my toy data fastest?” It is: “can a customer still find the black top, the hazelnut spread, and the product whose category is null?”

That is where the engineering begins.