Ask HN: Why do search functions everywhere not return what I search for?
It's driving me nuts.
All over the web, search functions don't actually return the word you searched for.
They seem to all do some sort of creative interpretation of what you searched for in the name of "relevance", thereby returning irrelevant results.
And in many cases, there is simply no way to do a literal word search. You'd expect maybe if you put your term in quotes that you would then get back precisely what you search for, but no..... again, the search function comes up with its own creative interpretation somehow.
Ugh why can't search...... search?
77 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadOne can go blue in the face “quoting” terms on Amazon search but they’ll just show whatever they want anyways completely ignoring the exact terms entered. I’d prefer them to say “we couldn’t find any results for you” than to give me pages of useless results instead.
I suspect it's deliberate. They're more interested in giving you what they want and trying to coerce you into that direction. I absolutely abhor it.
No solutions, but I empathize and it drives me nuts too.
If I do exact match for single words life is easy
Once you add phrases or punctuation and tell elastic search to find the best match (text analysis) then life isn't so simple anymore. It feels a bit like magic and I honestly cannot be bothered to become a language expert to know how to tune the machinery. The docs aren't great also.
Maybe there's a missing middle ?
Of course that if you're talking about social media, or search focused companies, they likely have other interests
Oh gods. I wrote our public search backend in ES a few years ago, then months of fine-tuning followed (whenever one of my coworkers searched and weren’t happy with the result). Today I barely understand what anything in the code is doing, but the results are good…
I agree with your observations. Google search seems to completely ignore search terms in quotation marks. It's like the search favours showing somewhat relevant results instead of nothing at all.
In general when I've landed on apparently unrelated pages and checked this it's been true.
This is often an anti-feature though - if I search for an exact match I probably don't want pages that don't visibly include it.
I am strongly reminded of the days when AltaVista searches had started turning up more and more spammy garbage and this young upstart with a funky name turned up to challenge them.
I reckon Google's crown could be grabbed by the end of the decade. Sooner if they're slow reacting to a challenger.
Google search is however personalized per user account in mysterious ways, so there's that at play as well
Pretty sure there's nothing more nefarious going on than a bunch of different engineers and different companies plugging in COTS text search solutions with minimal customization.
Sigh.
> Default settings for it include fuzzy matching and returning "relevant" results instead of only exact ones.
Which does not in any way say that it is incapable of literal search, only that it is not the default and that most go for the defaults.
Which has the flow on effect of any elasticsearch site effectively being useless or suboptimal for……. searching for something specific.
Put another way, ElasticSearch is the default search and it’s borked search across the entire web.
Let it go.
People run searches on their phones with typos. They don't have a good mental model for how search works, or how best to use it. If they search for "can puppy eat pork" they're actually looking for results about if dogs can eat ham.
As an expert user of search this infuriates me too, especially when tricks like double quoting don't get me what I'm looking for.
But as someone who often implements search engines I'm spending a lot more time thinking about fuzzy matches and semantic search (things like searches that use vector embeddings generated by language models).
Use fuzzy search as default, switch to exact search for everything written in quotes.
Where would be the problem?
The convention is well-known enough that even nontechnical users wouldn't be surprised by it.
But sometimes I do - and I die a little when there's no way to express that.
By the by I remember that one of the things that made me switch to Google from AltaVista was that Google were indexing the term "C++" as being distinct from "C" which obviously made a big difference to the utility of the results!
Instacart will show a couple of relevant items, and then a bunch absolutely random results, some of them being the opposite of what I asked for.
A lot of that is coming from optimizing for conversion. Turns out search isn't supposed to be accurate, it is supposed to generate money. You just happen to be the minority that cares about the exact thing.
Another reason is that search is just... hard.
Though in Amazon's case I bet it's just sheer incompetence caused by monopoly.
As as suggestion, try searching (or asking for recommendations) on ChatGPT for the same keyword
I’ll need evidence before I believe these assertions.
I think users want literal search first.
What's in it for them not to figure out what users want and deliver it?
At least I guess so, the nearest I have been to any kind of sales optimization pipeline is buying a lot of stuff online. :)
Smaller and niche sites can still do Real Search, but it's the large marketplaces with thousands of everything (where, you know, you really want good search) that usually instead favor their own optimization.
Actually, but perhaps surprisingly, a site like Aliexpress actually kind of explain this in their search help text, which is at least trying to be transparent. I like that, but it still drives me nuts when the search results change when you change to sort by price. That's like ... "impossible" in my mind; changing the presentation order of a list should not change the contents o of the list, but there you are.
Aargh, basically. I wish it could stop.
Applying Standard Capitalist Rules, I guess in the future you'll need to pay a fee to each site for the right to search and sort exactly and disable the optimizations for you. Fun times.
EDIT: Minor grammar fix.
However for a while now Linkedin job search seemingly shows me random stuff.. I can search for C++ and find all kinds of Java, Javascript, PHP jobs. It is driving me mad.
Any recommendations for job search sites (maybe even with negative filters)? I know about Who is Hiring? of course but there are not too many jobs for my region usually.
Drives me nuts too.
I mostly use LinkedIn as a place to curate my CV (resumé) and I reckon they'd be weak to a challenger who used that as their route into that market. Doubly so if they can figure out how to get the candidates to pay instead of the recruiters (there are more of us).
At the same time there’s a wish for searching for “what you meant” rather than “what you typed”.
They limit the results to like 5-10 videos and then replace the rest of the results with irrelevant videos under the "People also watched" tab where the results are the combined list of random words from the search query and "From related searches" tab where it's just random videos that belong to the same category of videos. This means that unless you're extremely blessed by the algorithm your video has basically no chance to show up in the search results, even if is relevant!
The weirdest thing is that the old search isn't even gone! You can still get relevant results after clicking "Filters" and then "Videos" in the "Type" column.
Who is this feature even for and what was the motivation for doing it? From the perspective of an actual user it makes no sense.
I think from the perspective of a social media company, the ideal UI would not allow the user any kind of agency in what content is shown and would be 100% driven by the algorithm.
Of course users don't want that, so what we have in practice is social media companies testing how close they can get to their ideal without upsetting too many users.
https://www.google.com/search?q=white+couple&source=lnms&tbm...
However "black couple" results are more relevant.
https://www.google.com/search?q=black+couple&source=lnms&tbm...
It's hard to believe that results are not manipulated for purpose.
This explanation seems reasonable, however should be fixed. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-image-search-results-rac...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Caucasian+couple&source=lnms...
"White" is a less preferred way of describing ethnicity, and I think that's why it's an issue.
Why would that be true?
If someone were to describe such a line of thinking it would be “I don’t really know how to work this computer thing, I know I want to search for ‘ponies’, but since the computer is smarter than me it’ll tell me something better than what I thought I wanted to know”
Is that the thought process that all the developers think users have? Makes no sense to me. Why wouldn’t and ordinary person want a job site for example to return exactly “pastry chef”?
Maybe people like GP here are the reason software gets suckier all the time.
You can bet that somewhere, someone was looking at some A/B testing with these "features" and they saw an uplift of X% in revenue, so why not do it?