# A dress, a tea bag, and a null

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

The [H&M catalogue](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Qdrant/hm_ecommerce_products) 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](https://huggingface.co/datasets/openfoodfacts/product-database) 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.