Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search
80
ttehwebguy about 3 hours ago 51 comments
FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Not just HN the site, everyone’s fuzzy search sucks. Let me do exact match search. Even if it’s an option I have to dig deep to find.
When I ran a site that had lots of search use I agonized over making search good and never nuked exact match for the sake of some fuzzy matching. I wish others would do the same.
Discussion (51 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
Adobe acrobat has "exact match" as part of its document search results, which is amazing
I've been looking at maybe switching to Tidal but the Spotify inertia is strong
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.
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.
If I want BR30 100W lightbulbs, don't show me 65W ones.
Ads are supposed to be for fuzziness, not search results.
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 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.
Often keeps the same spelling in other countries. Some outliers:
Χάρι Πότερ (Chi as approximation to soft H)
Hare Pota me te Whatu Manapou (written Māori is modern, and it attempts to avoid its foreign roots)
Harrius Potter (Vatican City)
Harijs Poters (Latvia)
Garri Potte (Uzbeki Russki)
Harry's name seems to remain the same in many translations: I assume as part of the overseas marketing of the title.
French changes Snape into Rogue (rogue means haughty and unpleasant), and Dutch turns Dumbledore into Perkamentus (the translator created a new name, and Rowling chose https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/harry-potter-words).
So fuzzy search helps people that don't know English that well.
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
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.
"New listings were added that match your search: <$search>"
so-that-was-a-fucking-lie.jpg
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...