Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

> Not just HN

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.

Quotes should be enough to trigger an exact search. How we regressed from this is beyond me

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.

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.

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).

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.

Best search is windows where u get trash can Onlineshop when u look for the trash and terminal the movie if u look for the terminal

script for finding HN GH links ranked

https://gist.github.com/hundredwatt/183191d02f1fe0db31c3e910...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Teams, Zulip, WhatsApp, they all suck so much... Discord is decent in my experience.

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

Hello there Youtube with your lowest common denominator cheap trash in search results

I feel you, I also prefer precise search in most cases.

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 put in a brand because I want _THAT_ brand, _THAT_ variant.

If I want BR30 100W lightbulbs, don't show me 65W ones.

Ads are supposed to be for fuzziness, not search results.

[dead]

I guess most sites just chuck it into elasticsearch and dial up the config values such as fuzziness?

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.

We need a new term.

To search for something is to believe you’ll probably find it. You’ll ignore anything that isn’t keys if you’re searching for your keys.

Fuzzy search is really the opposite: it will try to return something — anything — if it can’t find what you’re looking for (which it seemingly often doesn’t actually look for anyway). “I couldn’t find your keys, but here’s a pomegranate, a dried up dog turd, and a stray Cheeto from an inaccessible cabinet that hasn’t been opened since before you moved in”

another potential frustration is that HN (algolia) search also includes in the results any submission or comment by usernames/handles that match the keyword. ..so if a frequent commenter / poweruser matches your search term it becomes very messy to sift through unless you script/ublock out their matching sections

depending on the search intent it could potentially be useful, but a built in excluder option would be great for casual searchers that dont want their criterion to match handles

Worst part is I understand that fuzzy search is faster, and the easy next step is fuzzy search > exactly match in the results > only show those (or at least show them first)

Elasticsearch has been a plague for users who already know what they are looking for.