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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand this phenomenon where search boxes will stop presenting the phrase you want, after you’ve typed the next letter in the word.

    new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
    news -> suggests nothing

How does this happen? It is bizarre, it is the most frustrating little thing I can think of in computers, at least since USB became flip-able.

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I think there is some weighting based on how often you go to a certain result after typing a certain number of letters. For example, since I was just doing Advent of Code and going to related sites:

a, ad, adv -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023

adve -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023/day/1 [honestly, this one baffles me, but I guess I went back to day 1 at some point after typing `adve`]

adven, advent, advento -> first result is reddit.com/r/adventofcode

adventof -> back to adventofcode.com/2023

I actually *appreciate* this behavior; it means I can better muscle-memory a certain number of letters and go down to the first result when 2 sites have similar names (very annoying for twitter & twitch btw).

So I don't think the problem is that weights can change as you type more letters; but that an entry can disappear altogether when there are no other suggestions.

I’d much prefer they took VS Code’s fuzzy non contiguous substring searching algorithm. ra would be reddit.com/r/adventifcode, same for redadv, or r/a, etc. and things like a, ad, a3, etc. would be adventofcode.com/2023

And if they included the full URL, sheesh… you could effortlessly query against search params, path segments, fragments, and origins all in one intuitive interface.

That's been on the back of my mind but I guess I chalked it up to a bug and didn't think too much about it.

You're right though, this is incredibly dumb design.

There is a logic, you type "n" and "news.yc[...].com" comes up, so when you type "ne" then you're presumably (the logic goes) looking for something other than the website that was just presented to you; otherwise you would have chosen that website already rather than continuing to search by adding more letters.

In practice people type what they think will turn up the results "news", say, and don't look at the results until they're finished typing.

I guess that logic isn’t totally absurd. In that case, it would be nice if, under their “current best guess,” a descending list of all the previous “best guesses” was shown.

Another annoying aspect to it is that things enter your history as you browse, so the number of characters to hit that point where it shows what you want might shift around. Which totally destroys muscle memory. This isn’t the browser’s fault of course, but it would be nice if they could design around it.

Not quite the same, but iOS gives me trouble with its word suggestions. Usually, it’s contractions that make me curse.

‘It’ suggests It, It’s, and Its.

‘Its’ suggests Its and Itself.

Given that the apostrophe requires accessing a different keyboard overlay, and that only two suggestions are presented (leaving one suggestion slot empty), why not just include the contraction “It’s” in the suggestions?

A few versions back, iOS started sometimes not finding my searches in settings at all.

Like I’ll search the full word “passwords”, pausing after each letter, and not get the entry titled “passwords” in my results the whole time. Back out, do it again, this time it’s there by the time I type “pas”.

This used to work perfectly, but has been inconsistently broken for years now. Most recent time I saw it was a week or two ago, so it’s still happening. What’s most baffling to me is that a search over such a relatively static dataset (app settings are in there, but those don’t get added or modified often) can be non-deterministic.

iOS seems to have some weird temporary grammar check issues, where it’ll show the correction while it works out what you are trying to write. I think it only does it for long sentences, though.

But for example, if you start a sentence with “We’re,” it will often take out the apostrophe… until you reach the end of the sentence, and then when you add the period I guess it’ll analyze the sentence and figure out that you actually meant what you wrote, and put it back. It does highlight the corrections, which is really nice. At this point, I just ignore it until I’m done with the sentence and then go back and check.

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