YHK - yet another hacker news clone

78 points tehwebguy 2 hours ago 47 comments

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.

bawolff 1 hour ago | parent

> 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 1 hour ago | parent

Search input box is at the bottom, yes

bawolff 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

gabrielsroka 30 minutes ago | parent

Yes: https://hn.algolia.com

gertburger 12 minutes ago | parent

that is algolia's search of hn...

tetris11 1 hour ago | parent

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

mikewarot 1 hour ago | parent

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

CircuitSeuss 1 hour ago | parent

If regex were default…

mmargenot 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mrngm 1 hour ago | parent

Asana has the same problem. Really frustrating.

bentt 1 hour ago | parent

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

danielrmay 52 minutes ago | parent

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.

Tossrock 45 minutes ago | parent

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

apsurd 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

artemonster 43 minutes ago | parent

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 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

heisenbit 31 minutes ago | parent

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

LukaD 10 minutes ago | parent

Same with iOS quick search...

archonis 1 hour ago | parent

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.

habitue 53 minutes ago | parent

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

Fannon 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

lukan 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

LiamPowell 31 minutes ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

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

leros 1 hour ago | parent

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 32 minutes ago | parent

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.)

leros 20 minutes ago | parent

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 15 minutes ago | parent

This works since nearly forever.

pibaker 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

aeagentic 1 hour ago | parent

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

soupspaces 1 hour ago | parent

script for finding HN GH links ranked

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

NikolaNovak 1 hour ago | parent

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 30 minutes ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 53 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

yallpendantools 1 hour ago | parent

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.

rahulmax 1 hour ago | parent

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.

KolmogorovComp 1 hour ago | parent

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

rep_movsd 59 minutes ago | parent

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

wseqyrku 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

alex1138 57 minutes ago | parent

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

Fannon 49 minutes ago | parent

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

OptionOfT 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

alt227 31 minutes ago | parent

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

jimmar 31 minutes ago | parent

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.