Posted by tehwebguy 3 hours ago
Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search
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.
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...