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Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

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41–50 of 64 posts

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#41
post #11

Spotify's fuzzy search makes me want to do pirating again. Looking for a non mainstream artist can be really hard at times for no good reason than to appeal to the dumb average user. I even tried to build my own spotify player and going over the API - same shit (allmost).

Artists will at least show up further down the list usually. With songs it often just will not show the song at all when the title is an exact match, it will instead fill the entire results list with "lyric matches" that I'm sure don't have matches at all as they're often in different languages to the search query.

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#43
I searched for "ophthalmologist," got a list of results, and made an appointment. Only later did I discover that my search engine had shown me results for "optometrist" instead of the term I searched for. It was not helpful. The optometrist could not provide the care I needed and it was a waste of time and money. That experience added to my distrust of search results.

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#45

Oh man, I hate my area has switched to Facebook marketplace over Kijiji or even craigslist. Even when an ad exists with EXACT obscure model I'm looking for... It spits out pages of unrelated or semi related garbage before it may or may not show me what I'm actually looking for :-( Quotes, slashes, nothing seems to work. So I'm with you! Sometimes I just want an exact literal search.

Facebook is the biggest offender (could say that a lot tbh)

"New listings were added that match your search: "

so-that-was-a-fucking-lie.jpg

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#46
post #11

Spotify's fuzzy search makes me want to do pirating again. Looking for a non mainstream artist can be really hard at times for no good reason than to appeal to the dumb average user. I even tried to build my own spotify player and going over the API - same shit (allmost).

I would gladly go back to piracy but music piracy is way harder than the old days, thanks to Spotify.

I've been looking at maybe switching to Tidal but the Spotify inertia is strong

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#47
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.)

No idea. When I was looking it up, I did see that advanced searching has to be enabled in Algolia for it to work.

Re: Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

#48
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.)

This works since nearly forever.
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