> 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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

script for finding HN GH links ranked

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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