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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by 58008@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] hedgehog@ttrpg.network 46 points 4 months ago

It’s largely the first one, at least according to The Man Who Killed Google Search.

See also the Hackernews discussion and this follow-up article by the same author (with links to an article with Google’s response, summaries of other discussions on the topic, etc.)

[-] Enoril@jlai.lu 3 points 4 months ago

Wow, spent the last 30min to read everything. Thanks for sharing this, really interesting articles.

this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
199 points (100.0% liked)

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