[desc]

I know why this happens.

It happens because someone doesn't understand that search rankings vs. queries have to have a 'smooth' solution, and thinks they can tweak a few weightings here and there to get the results they think are 'correct' for the very specific cases they have in mind, without realising that this has a knock-on effect on the entire scoring space and you get odd singularities and stuff popping up as a result.

The people in question should not be touching anything even distantly related to a computer in any professional context.

[mattmanser]

I try not to say things like that anymore, you've never met the person and have no idea of the context or their skills.

Could be that they were forced to change it at the 11th hour just before Windows 10 was being demo'd and it was never changed back. Could be a committee decision. Could be the programmer hated the surveillance installed by MS and so deliberately made the search bad.

[desc]

The 'someone' in question probably wasn't the engineer.

I'd bet the engineer was listening to the 'someone' saying things like 'why don't you just' or 'it just needs to do this', or other things including the word 'just'.

I'd bet the engineer tried to explain the realities of how this stuff works, to 'someone' who's job didn't involve understanding what they were asking for, and reacted by demanding with the word 'just' instead of pretending to ask.

[Dylan16807]

It goes far beyond weightings, things will be completely missing with no reason.