21–30 of 64 posts
Quotes should be enough to trigger an exact search. How we regressed from this is beyond me
Strong agree... now if only there were a way to specify "text" followed by a non-alphanumeric character. Some words I need to find turn out to be prefixes. 8( Adobe acrobat has "exact match" as part of its document search results, which is amazing
I did the exact + fuzzy pattern on a project and it was so satisfying to watch people finding it useful.
Try it here. https://trustedgyn.com/ (a directory, for public good, hopefully you never have to use.) Make mistakes in the search bar and the model fixes it for you. For folks who are not native english, I found it helps a lot.
I understand the comment, and the spirit, but speaking only for myself, I find the HN search to be quite useful. I'm thinking that double-quotes does, indeed, force an exact search. But fuzzy searches can be extremely useful. Most folks are "fuzzy." Google built a pretty huge empire, on simple, fuzzy search.
I was considering whether OP's complaint is an engineer's thing. My conclusion, based on my own experience is, the more your user base tends toward power-users/highly-skilled use cases, the more deterministic your search should be.
A random guy might try to look for a kid's novel series about wizards that sounds like "Happy Fathers". That's when you need Google-level fuzzy search to bridge that gap and suggest "Harry Potter". As a general search engine, Google encounters this a lot.
Same guy asks a librarian, the librarian would instantly know what he's talking about. The Librarian searches the catalog for "Harry Potter" but might misspell it "Harry Poter" or search for "the philosopher's stone" in a US catalog. These cases can be fairly covered by deterministic search methods/classic indexing.
Exact match results followed by fuzzy match would cover most use cases, and clear toggles would cover the remaing ones. It boggles the mind why this particular wheel keeps getting reinvented in octoganal shapes.
Gmail's search on mobile, where things come up in the quick results only to disappear when I complete the search, is a millstone about my neck.
In a private bookmark extension project, I explictly supported both and made it easy to switch them any time: https://github.com/Fannon/search-bookmarks-history-and-tabs
If I want BR30 100W lightbulbs, don't show me 65W ones.
Ads are supposed to be for fuzziness, not search results.