Wouldn’t it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for “this is my phrase” rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?

There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website’s search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:

  1. The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
  2. They’re just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don’t think it’s worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.

Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?

Cheers!

EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I’m mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don’t seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.

  • Skull giverA
    45·
    3 days ago

    Because you can’t just boolean search the entirety of the web the same way you do a local database. You’re not getting all results every time you search, that’d be insanely inefficient, so doing full filters like with boolean database search won’t work.

    That said, based on my experience with Google, negations work just fine, as do double quotes. Last time I checked NEAR even worked pretty well. AND is implied, OR used to work but is probably derived from the rest of the query these days.

    People hate it when their query doesn’t return anything. So, whenever you search for something and get very little results, search engines will relax their boundaries to find something that may answer your query.

    Search engines in the early 00s had them because they required very specific phrase matches and the experience was horrible. You either got millions or results that didn’t relate to what you were searching for or you got none and had to start over.

    At some point, search engines started interpreting what you mean instead of what you type. For most people, searching for “rain” and getting results about “precipitation” is exactly what they want. Using the 90s/00s search term syntax, you’d need to type “~rain” to also get synonyms, which is obviously a terrible user experience that serves only the most pedantic people.