This, and some results smartly ignoring the selected sort order because gmail suggests you "follow up", both work together to paint a vivid picture of a disassociated product team who no longer understands their customer.
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.
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).
From a UX perspective, try exact first, then fuzzy. Add an AI-assisted search if you have the patience to build it, and a few bucks for the API cost.
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.
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.
> 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 less 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.
Amen! I hate this trend towards fuzzy-first for everything. Deterministic should be default, fuzzy should be a special toggle.
I'd say close to 90% of my daily searches could be served with exact matching. The next 8-9% could be solved by a little more deterministic sophistication (e.g., edit distance, equivalence classes for synonyms). Then the last 1-2% is when I really need some fuzzy magic; mostly to give me an idea what to do with obscure programming-related problems.
If I want BR30 100W lightbulbs, don't show me 65W ones.
Ads are supposed to be for fuzziness, not search results.
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.
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
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.
It boggles the mind why this particular wheel keeps getting reinvented in octoganal shapes.
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.
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 less 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.
I'd say close to 90% of my daily searches could be served with exact matching. The next 8-9% could be solved by a little more deterministic sophistication (e.g., edit distance, equivalence classes for synonyms). Then the last 1-2% is when I really need some fuzzy magic; mostly to give me an idea what to do with obscure programming-related problems.
Umm, does HN even have a search?
Almost every site i've ever used the search of supported exact matches by putting the query in quote marks.
Although when i tested it just now it did seem to support exact matches using quotes.
https://gist.github.com/hundredwatt/183191d02f1fe0db31c3e910...