Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tauntz 853 days ago
> This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing, if you query is bad or too specific.

Yes but there's a >0% chance that you'll click on a potentially sponsored link (or a non-sponsored link to a page that itself contains ads) when you instead see a bunch of unrelated results. It makes financial sense to show random results vs not showing anything.