Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search

[tehwebguy]

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.

[mmargenot]

Gmail's search on mobile, where things come up in the quick results only to disappear when I complete the search, is a millstone about my neck.

[danielrmay]

This, and some results smartly ignoring the selected sort order because gmail suggests you "follow up", both work together to paint a vivid picture of a disassociated product team who no longer understands their customer.

[cadamsdotcom]

Fastmail is great, and has fantastic migration tools. I have all 131,000+ emails in Fastmail, nothing left in gmail, I don't miss it.

And the search works and is precise.

Took me months to decide to migrate (even though its on my own domain) but I haven't looked back.

[Tossrock]

Gmail search has really gone to the dogs, lately. The new AI inbox is surprisingly useful, though. No doubt a coincidence.

[apsurd]

tangential but Google finance (stocks) turned unusable for me: https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/CART:NASDAQ

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.

[LukaD]

Same with iOS quick search...

[heisenbit]

Google hard at work to catch up with MS Teams search.

[mrngm]

Asana has the same problem. Really frustrating.

[bentt]

Killing and restarting the app unbreaks this. Maybe someone from the team could, you know, fix that?

[artemonster]

is there a way to fix this? came up couple of times rather critical when I couldnt find an important mail, it just stopped showing up with the search query that I used

[mmargenot]

I just retried a few queries that were failing ~3 days ago and they are returning correct [enough] results on mobile as of today, when I don't need them. I'm not sure of the cause or how to actually trigger a reindex or a fix when I need it.

[leros]

HackerNews search respects double quotes around your terms as an exact match, as do many other search engines.

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.

[tehwebguy]

Just confirmed! (Is this new? I could swear it didn't work a few months ago when I was looking for stories about Bright Data before all the news articles about the residential proxies.)

[pibaker]

This has been a standard feature for nearly all non trivial search engines for at least two decades. I remember this being a feature when I first used google over two decades ago.

[bpalmerau]

It worked in Alta Vista

[leros]

No idea. When I was looking it up, I did see that advanced searching has to be enabled in Algolia for it to work.

[comment0r]

This works since nearly forever.

[lukan]

Spotify's fuzzy search makes me want to do pirating again. Looking for a non mainstream artist can be really hard at times for no good reason than to appeal to the dumb average user. I even tried to build my own spotify player and going over the API - same shit (allmost).

[inigyou]

Spotify really wants you to play Spotify's own AI music, since they get to pay themselves the artist royalty.

[LiamPowell]

Artists will at least show up further down the list usually. With songs it often just will not show the song at all when the title is an exact match, it will instead fill the entire results list with "lyric matches" that I'm sure don't have matches at all as they're often in different languages to the search query.

[queenkjuul]

I would gladly go back to piracy but music piracy is way harder than the old days, thanks to Spotify.

I've been looking at maybe switching to Tidal but the Spotify inertia is strong

[tetris11]

Quotes should be enough to trigger an exact search. How we regressed from this is beyond me

[mikewarot]

Strong agree... now if only there were a way to specify "text" followed by a non-alphanumeric character. Some words I need to find turn out to be prefixes. 8(

Adobe acrobat has "exact match" as part of its document search results, which is amazing

[CircuitSeuss]

If regex were default…

[rahulmax]

From a UX perspective, try exact first, then fuzzy. Add an AI-assisted search if you have the patience to build it, and a few bucks for the API cost.

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.

[archonis]

Exact match results followed by fuzzy match would cover most use cases, and clear toggles would cover the remaing ones.

It boggles the mind why this particular wheel keeps getting reinvented in octoganal shapes.

[Fannon]

I tried this actually and wasn't so happy with the results. First you search / index twice and that will cost. You'll have to wait for the slower of the two as you don't want to reorder after already showing the user.

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.

[joshspankit]

Fuzzy is usually faster. Grab the fuzzy results then exact match within them, no second index needed

[archonis]

That's a fair point. Personally, the search latency wouldn't bother me unless search is the primary mode of interaction in the application context.

[habitue]

Exact match on a typo brings up a submission with that typo, which is likely low quality

[archonis]

I guess one man's quirk is another man's feature. (or vice-versa)

[OptionOfT]

I put in a brand because I want _THAT_ brand, _THAT_ variant.

If I want BR30 100W lightbulbs, don't show me 65W ones.

Ads are supposed to be for fuzziness, not search results.

[jimmar]

I searched for "ophthalmologist," got a list of results, and made an appointment. Only later did I discover that my search engine had shown me results for "optometrist" instead of the term I searched for. It was not helpful. The optometrist could not provide the care I needed and it was a waste of time and money. That experience added to my distrust of search results.

[NikolaNovak]

Oh man, I hate my area has switched to Facebook marketplace over Kijiji or even craigslist.

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.

[tehwebguy]

Facebook is the biggest offender (could say that a lot tbh)

"New listings were added that match your search: <$search>"

so-that-was-a-fucking-lie.jpg

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I understand the comment, and the spirit, but speaking only for myself, I find the HN search to be quite useful.

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.

[yallpendantools]

> 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.

[robocat]

> Harry Potter

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.

Edit: When I'm in other countries, I regularly struggle to understand local pronunciation for English names like when someone struggled to tell me who Piratus Draque was, or Cristóbal Colón (Christophorus Columbus). English speaking people are lucky that high-status English has the norm of using people's own original pronounciation and often retains spelling (we butcher some languages more than others, but to me it seems that Spanish butchers all names). Although some get changed on purpose like Kant.

[gumby]

We need a new term.

To search for something is to believe you’ll probably find it. You’ll ignore anything that isn’t keys if you’re searching for your keys.

Fuzzy search is really the opposite: it will try to return something — anything — if it can’t find what you’re looking for (which it seemingly often doesn’t actually look for anyway). “I couldn’t find your keys, but here’s a pomegranate, a dried up dog turd, and a stray Cheeto from an inaccessible cabinet that hasn’t been opened since before you moved in”

[joshspankit]

Worst part is I understand that fuzzy search is faster, and the easy next step is fuzzy search > exactly match in the results > only show those (or at least show them first)

Elasticsearch has been a plague for users who already know what they are looking for.

[Fannon]

I feel you, I also prefer precise search in most cases.

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

[alt227]

I guess most sites just chuck it into elasticsearch and dial up the config values such as fuzziness?

[KolmogorovComp]

Teams, Zulip, WhatsApp, they all suck so much... Discord is decent in my experience.

[aeagentic]

Best search is windows where u get trash can Onlineshop when u look for the trash and terminal the movie if u look for the terminal

[yallpendantools]

Amen! I hate this trend towards fuzzy-first for everything. Deterministic should be default, fuzzy should be a special toggle.

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.

[alex1138]

Hello there Youtube with your lowest common denominator cheap trash in search results

[bawolff]

> Not just HN

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.

[mplanchard]

Search input box is at the bottom, yes

[bawolff]

Oh wow. Never noticed that before. Guess im blind.

Although when i tested it just now it did seem to support exact matches using quotes.

[bdangubic]

absolute marvel of design. it is exactly where it should be!

[gabrielsroka]

Yes: https://hn.algolia.com

[gertburger]

that is algolia's search of hn...

[downloadram]

another potential frustration is that HN (algolia) search also includes in the results any submission or comment by usernames/handles that match the keyword. ..so if a frequent commenter / poweruser matches your search term it becomes very messy to sift through unless you script/ublock out their matching sections

depending on the search intent it could potentially be useful, but a built in excluder option would be great for casual searchers that dont want their criterion to match handles

[soupspaces]

script for finding HN GH links ranked

https://gist.github.com/hundredwatt/183191d02f1fe0db31c3e910...

[rep_movsd]

How hard is it to do plain search first for crying out loud.

[wseqyrku]

Funny you asked, turns out it is quite hard because you must know a lot more about nature of your data and also intricate user needs to design an effective system like that. Fuzzy search is like bluetooth, slap it on and it kind of sort of works. Afterall, everything is better with bluetooth.