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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

Elasticsearch or a functionally equivalent competitor is a straightforward commercial-off-the-shelf solution for text search. Default settings for it include fuzzy matching and returning "relevant" results instead of only exact ones.

Pretty sure there's nothing more nefarious going on than a bunch of different engineers and different companies plugging in COTS text search solutions with minimal customization.

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Some kind of weirdness is in almost all search-engines. I recently wondered why our backend search based on SQL Server would not return the expected results, turns out that for some reason, it has a stoplist that includes a ton of Roman numerals (also written out numbers twentyone, twentytwo… I have no idea what the thinking is there), so searching for "Sony Alpha III" is exactly the same as searching for "Sony Alpha IV" because III and IV are neither indexed nor searched for.

Lots of people here saying ElasticSearch can’t actually do straightforward literal searches.

Sigh.

You should reread. The phrasing is:

> Default settings for it include fuzzy matching and returning "relevant" results instead of only exact ones.

Which does not in any way say that it is incapable of literal search, only that it is not the default and that most go for the defaults.

So, better phrased as, “the most widely used search engine, elasticsearch, defaults to fuzzy matching not precise matching”.

Which has the flow on effect of any elasticsearch site effectively being useless or suboptimal for……. searching for something specific.

Put another way, ElasticSearch is the default search and it’s borked search across the entire web.

The phrasing of the original poster was just fine. You misrepresented what they said and now you're trying to backpedal.

Let it go.

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