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Comment by sh4z | Hacker News Reader

So would you have rather got results with only 'storename' and not 'return policy', or no results at all, or what's the problem here?

If there was a result containing the whole search string it would (I believe) have been the first one.

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If you don't have any results for the query, then return a page saying so. Otherwise you're annoying the user by making them scan through a page of irrelevant text to confirm that it really is all irrelevant. When this happens to me my reaction is "don't just ignore what I said to you", which is as infuriating when a computer does it as when a human does.

Google returns results specifically showing which terms were missing if this were the case for me. This is useful for finding articles with intersections of concepts (assuming I got the terminology/jargon right) and knowing when those probably don't exist, so I like the feature.

This being relatively large chain store, I'm quite certain there should be forum posts or reddit discussions about their return policy. I have no way of proving they exist, seeing as how Google is shit at finding stuff.

"So what's the problem here"? The problem is, the search engine threw away one third of my query terms, and then gave me all chaff. Apparently I should've thrown in some random punctuation to convince it to actually use all of them.

Can you just tell the name of the store? I want to see for example what happens if I select verbatim mode.

Example with Target, in DDG, verbatim: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22target%22+%22return+policy%22&t...

Seems to work.

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