Thank you for your thoughts and I miss literal searches too. Our feeling is that they don't have to be mutually exclusive. So we're trying to build both, including slash commands, advanced operators and some ideas borrowed from the terminal.
While it's early days, we've already got some cool things working on that front, including the ability to totally bypass NLP and do advanced operators.
So for example, try some of the following:
Use '/e' to skip the AI (exact):
```/e site:cnn.com +"mars rover"```
DDG-style !bang commands are supported. Try:
```!a shoes```
Search X for Y - and see the results within Andi:
```/s reddit duckduckgo```
```/s google python list comprehension```
or just:
```search reddit for duckduckgo```
Direct navigation to on-site searches with 'go' or '/g':
```/g twitter elonmusk free speech```
```go youtube cute pandas```
```go politics on reddit```
You can use this to directly navigate to pretty much any site, or any search result on any site.
There's quite a bit more, and more coming.
So it has both direct literal commands (including operators like quotes etc where we can), and also natural language.
Natural language has a lot of advantages working with language models for things like question answering. There are subtle clues in the way we say things to each other as humans that help supply meaningful information, and for those sorts of questions, Andi does much better when people ask questions in plain language including extra information above keywords.
So we're trying to build a search that supports both approaches.
Also, more terminal like things are coming. Try [space] and up/down arrow to start navigating history.