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by madrox 2938 days ago
20 years ago, the best we could do was boolean filters. Then Google came along and we've been charging forth down the fuzzy road ever since. At the first WSDM conference, intent was all anyone was interested in figuring out.

Now the population at large is far more computer literate than ever. I wonder if we still really need fuzzy search for everything in the same way we did 20 years ago. It seems like many geo-related problems would be better served by better boolean search.
1 comments
CamperBob2 2938 days ago
Agreed, the loss of "programmer-friendly" features like wildcard and boolean matching is one downside of the progress made in the last couple of decades.

This isn't such a massive problem with Google as it is on specialized search engines like eBay's. A fuzzy search is worse than useless when you're looking for items with very specific names.

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