Ask HN: Is there any pure keywords based search engine?

11 points·alok-g··10 comments

Various search engines including Google, Bing, Amazon product search, etc. have added "smarts" because of which I often see results which do not even include all of the keywords I typed. Even the "Verbatim" option with Google is not helping. Is there a search engine which is purely keyword based and which would end the results list instead of adding results which do not even match.

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Try https://duckduckgo.com and https://searx.me/.

I use duckduckgo as my primary search engine, and I frequently see search results that don't include all the keywords I entered. Sometimes they rank higher than results that do contain all the keywords.

Does it also happen when you use quotes?

Sometimes quotes help, but not always.

Depends on what you mean by “keyword based”. For me, that doesn’t imply it’s should only return pages containing all words you entered, exactly.

As an extreme example, searching for “foo bar baz”, a page containing every combination of up to four letters will contain every keyword you entered, but, it could be argued, should still score lower than a 100-word page with 5 instances of “foo”, 3 of “bar”, and none of “baz”.

Understood. However, I find irrelevant results far too often in practice most of which can be avoided based on mere absence of the requested keywords.

Searx is again doing the same thing. I see many search results where two out of the three keywords I requested aren't even there.

I know it's Google[1] but try this:

https://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search

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[1] Boo, hiss, etc. ;)

https://private.sh

This is doing the same thing also. I see many results on the front page where the keywords requested are not even there (and the result is thereby irrelevant).

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