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Comment by romellem | Hacker News Reader

I agree with [this][1] idea:

> an autocomplete has one chance to reorder per keystroke. if you got it wrong and you have a better ordering a bit later you must “swallow the sadness” (as per the original author of this wisdom) but never change already displayed items

[1]: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1470751551568363530

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I want foo.

- Type 'f'

- foo appears in the search.

- Type 'o', because I type with 10 appendages and getting them to work together requires pipelining.

- foo disappears from the search

This should never happen.

This happens all the time on iOS with the “predictive text” feature, it’s maddening.

Just wanted to comment in agreement and confirm that this exact scenario drives me insane. Adding more information that agrees with the existing top suggestion should never change that top suggestion.

+1000. I forget which search -- it's probably macOS Spotlight -- drives me batty with this daily.

Firefox has a related misdesign. If you type a word which matches both a search keyword and a history item, the search keyword takes precedence -- which is nonsensical, since I've typed nothing (not even a space) following the search keyword. So e.g. I have a `cpp` keyword to search `en.cppreference.com`; typing `cp`+Enter brings up `en.cppreference.com`, as does `cppr`+Enter, but `cpp`+Enter does a search for an empty string.

Spotlight 100%

Concrete example from my firefox url bar -

type 'for' - forums.overclockers.co.uk appears, this is where I'm going, I go here once on most days

type 'forums', because my fingers didn't get the memo to stop - forums.samygo.tv appears at the top, a site I haven't visited (on purpose) in almost a decade, mostly because I don't have that tv any more.

Massively annoying.

Sorting by frequency/recency looks like the culprit. You often type 'for' and select forums.overclockers.co.uk, so the engine takes that into account and prioritizes that candidate, but you haven't done the same when typing 'forums', so it falls back on its normal sorting algorithm.

Seems that if a program has frequency/recency sorting, it'd best have an additional layer of intelligence such that it checks what results would've been returned by other substrings of your search term.

Or just key the frequency on the item clicked, not the term used to get there. If I use something a lot, it should generally take precedence over other possible matches.

Right! That makes sense.

On the other side it is rational if you think about it in abstract where there is no latency between screen and keyboard input. The likely reason you continued typing is that the prompt didn't include what you wanted.

I can see it as rational from a number of viewpoints - "When user types 'fo' they want to go here, 'foru' usually results in this, 'forum' has this result etc etc.

But I think all those other viewpoints lead to less desirable behaviour, for me. I'm not going to pretend it's universal because I don't have the research, but it pisses me off.

Spotlight on my iPhone does this.

I want my bank, Monzo.

I type Mo

It shows Monzo

But I instinctively type an 'n'

It shows a Google result for "Monica" whoever the hell that is, plus driving directions to somewhere, plus settings, plus results from my emails, plus results from my messages, plus every Easter Monday since the dawn of time from my calendar, plus a whole load of photos it decided were relevant... everything except Monzo.

Now I have to type 'z' to get Monzo to display again

Can someone please tell the Windows Start Menu designers? Have completely ruined the experience as it constantly juggles items as its heuristics are seemingly updated. I especially enjoy how Bing results get prioritized over local applications and files.

You're the product. I'm not sure they care what you think.

I cannot figure out how "upd" shows Windows Update but "update" does not.

I realized the other day "stor" brings up Photos as the first result. I'm dumbfounded.

That can be desirable if the filesystem path to Photos includes a directory named something like "storage". Of course it should still prioritize apps that actually have "stor" in the name, but maybe you didn't have any?

No - Microsoft Store was installed. And what I was looking for. (To see the new WSL GUI app.)

But most of all it doesn’t seem to be deterministic. Very often I get a different behavior on the second attempt.

Search in windows puzzles me. Like I don’t get why it takes so long to search files in explorer, while traversing the same folder structure programmatically takes milliseconds. Hard computer science problem!

I think search in windows makes a stab at searching content as well, and not just straight text. This means unpacking zips, loading excel files etc.

But, yeah, it sucks.

I am not even sure it's the case. In explorer options, search, both "include compressed files" and "always search file names and content" are unchecked by default. And from the behaviour it seems to only search file names indeed.

I suspect it has more to do to explorer registering something with the file system to be notified if any of the folders being searched change or something like that. Something completely useless in any case, I'd much rather it doesn't do anything smart and gives me a result instantaneously.

If you don't have it already, I'll shill for the excellent tool "Everything" by voidtools. This is a must-have for me on any new Windows install.

> I cannot figure out how "upd" shows Windows Update but "update" does not.

This drives me crazy.

Users are spending more time in the Start Menu, and visit Bing more often: engagement metrics are up!

The sane alternative is to use OpenShell.

One can only hope that this thread finds a way onto some responsible MS employee monitor.

Yeah, MS is not good at search, but I think having one engineer tackle windows search for over all these years would have brought us instant and relevant search results.

How many times I have to find the right keyword to find something I KNOW is there but that satisfies the search engine is more than I want to recount.

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