> If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you're on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?
So if you for example compare "SDL tutorial" with "SDL tutorials". On google you'd get the same stuff, this search engine, for better or worse doesn't.
This is a design decision, for now anyway, mostly because I'm incredibly annoyed when algorithms are second-guessing me. On the other hand, it does mean you sometimes have to try different searches to get relevant results.
On the other hand, Google’s unawareness of (extensive and ubiquitous) Russian noun morphology is essentially what allowed Yandex to exist: both 2011 Yandex and 2021 Google are much more helpful for Russian than 2011 Google. I suspect (but have not checked) that the engine under discussion is utterly unusable for it. English (along with other Germanic and Romance languages to a lesser extent) is quite unusual in being meaningfully searchable without any understanding of morphology, globally speaking.
I... don’t think anything particularly surprising is happening here, except for quotes being apparently ignored? I’ve had it explained to me that a rare word is essentially indistinguishable from a popular misspelling by NLP techniques as they currently exist, except by feeding the machine a massive dictionary (and perhaps not even then). BRST is a thing that you essentially can’t even define satisfactorily without at the very least four years of university-level physics (going by the conventional broad approach—the most direct possible road can of course be shorter if not necessarily more illuminating). “Best” is a very popular word both generally and in searches, and the R key is next to E on a Latin keyboard. If you are a perfect probabilistic reasoner with only these facts for context (and especially if you ignore case), I can very well believe that your best possible course of action is to assume a typo.
How to permit overriding that decision (and indeed how to recognize you’ve actually made one worth worrying about without massive human input—e.g. Russian adjectives can have more than 20 distinct forms, can be made up on the spot by following productive word-formation processes, and you don’t want to learn all of the world’s languages!) is simply a very difficult problem for what is probably a marginal benefit in the grand scheme of things.
I just dislike hitting these margins so much.
(DDG docs do say it supports +... and even +"...", but I can’t seem to get them to do what I want.)
There are six of them (nominal [subject], genitive [belonging, part, absence, “of”], dative [indirect object, recipient, “to”], accusative [direct object], instrumental [device, means, “by”], prepositional [what the hell even is this]), so you have (cases) × (numbers) = 6 × 2 = 12 noun forms, and adjectives agree in number and gender with their noun, but (unlike Romance languages) plurals don’t have gender, so you have (cases) × (numbers and genders) = 6 × (3 + 1) = 24 adjective forms.
None of this would be particularly problematic, except these forms work like French or Spanish verbs: they are synthetic (case, number and gender are all a single fused ending, not orthogonal ones) and highly convoluted with a lot of irregularities. And nouns and adjectives are usually more important for a web search than verbs.
Hmm I seem to be getting only relevant results, no "best", not sure what you mean. Are you not doing verbatim search?
https://e.humanities.uva.nl/publications/2004/kamp_lang04.pd...
Re compounds, I expected they would be more or less easy to deal with by relatively dumb splitting, similar to greedy solutions to the “no spaces” problem of Chinese and Japanese, and your link seems to bear that out. But yeah, cheers to more language-specific stuff in your indexing. /s