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Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

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31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#31

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.

Gmail search has really gone to the dogs, lately. The new AI inbox is surprisingly useful, though. No doubt a coincidence.

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#33

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.

is there a way to fix this? came up couple of times rather critical when I couldnt find an important mail, it just stopped showing up with the search query that I used

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#34

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.

Gmail search has really gone to the dogs, lately. The new AI inbox is surprisingly useful, though. No doubt a coincidence.

tangential but Google finance (stocks) turned unusable for me: https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/CART:NASDAQ

I can't for the life of me understand how to use it, especially on mobile. Everything turns into an AI conversation. WTF I just want to see the ticker chart. It makes me feel old and out of touch. But also, it's just so horrible. Truly unusable. I went with apple and yahoo - tons of ads but at least I can see the chart.

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#35

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.

is there a way to fix this? came up couple of times rather critical when I couldnt find an important mail, it just stopped showing up with the search query that I used

I just retried a few queries that were failing ~3 days ago and they are returning correct [enough] results on mobile as of today, when I don't need them. I'm not sure of the cause or how to actually trigger a reindex or a fix when I need it.

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#36

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.

I tried this actually and wasn't so happy with the results. First you search / index twice and that will cost. You'll have to wait for the slower of the two as you don't want to reorder after already showing the user.

You'd need some scoring where precise hits get better score than those only found by fuzzy search. With that it's maybe acceptable, but I personally preferred just being able to switch it easily/quickly when needed and by preference.

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#38
post #12

HackerNews search respects double quotes around your terms as an exact match, as do many other search engines. For example search for "Amerca" with and without quotes. Without quotes you get content for "America" but with quotes you only get the exact typo match.

Just confirmed! (Is this new? I could swear it didn't work a few months ago when I was looking for stories about Bright Data before all the news articles about the residential proxies.)

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#40

How hard is it to do plain search first for crying out loud.

Funny you asked, turns out it is quite hard because you must know a lot more about nature of your data and also intricate user needs to design an effective system like that. Fuzzy search is like bluetooth, slap it on and it kind of sort of works. Afterall, everything is better with bluetooth.
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