Product design question

Design a search engine for enterprises.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Tests product design for enterprise search, a fundamentally different problem from web search.

Clarify the domain: searching across an enterprise's siloed internal content, documents, wikis, chat and tickets, not the public web.
Identify pain points: content is fragmented across disconnected tools, and permission boundaries must be respected per document.
Design federated connectors indexing major internal tools, permission-aware results, and ranking weighted by team, role and recency rather than popularity.
Treat permission-awareness as a non-negotiable trust and security requirement before any relevance tuning.
Define success as search-to-found-answer rate, time-to-find, and a reduction in asking a coworker instead of searching.

Calls out permission-aware indexing as the hard, non-negotiable constraint that differentiates enterprise from web search.
Grounds relevance ranking in enterprise-specific signals, team, role and recency, instead of copying popularity-based ranking.
Addresses content fragmentation across many disconnected internal tools directly.

Designing this like a mini Google without addressing permissions or security, a dealbreaker for enterprise deployment.
Ignoring content fragmentation across many disconnected internal tools.

How would you handle real-time permission changes, like someone losing access to a document?
How would you measure search quality without page-view-style engagement data?