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Comment by declaredapple | Hacker News Reader

> if you query is bad or too specific.

Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.

> This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing

WHY?! That's the opposite of it's job!

I have an account with a username that is spelled very similarly to a real word. Google will suggest searching for the real word instead. If you do that though, you'll never find the username!

I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what I tell it to. It's like children who won't even attempt a multiple choice test because they aren't 100% sure

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> Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.

No the hell not. It should do what I tell it to. For a search engine that is to show me what it has about the query I input. If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It should not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what it "think" I meant. Not its job.

> No the hell not. It should do what I tell it to.

That's what I said. "then evaluate the query anyway." I should have added "original" to that statement

> If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It should not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what it "think" I meant. Not its job.

I'm saying I don't want similarity cutoffs. Most FTS methods involve a similarity score, I'm saying I don't want only results with > 0.1 similarity. I want all of them that were returned.

I'm NOT saying it should somehow inject results that didn't originate from the original FTS query.

I feel like you're arguing against yourself.

> I feel like you're arguing against yourself.

Hacker News in a nutshell.

the irony in this comment is delicious :-)

It's sillier if you imagine the query in SQL. How can the database fulfill both "all queries have at least one row" and also "your WHERE clauses are interpreted exactly?"

What are you talking about? Have you ever worked with full text search?

I'm saying I don't like high cutoffs of similarity scores. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Very very few queries should have _literally zero results_. Surely you have at least a few words in common with something

I don't understand what you mean.

I'm saying if you have a query that returns a similarity score, I don't want only results with > 0.1. I want all the results returned

>> if you query is bad or too specific.

> Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.

Google does this, and they suck at it, unless you just spelled a word wrong. Do a niche or very specific query, for which Google has no answer and it will, without fail, remove the most relevant keyword and give you a bunch of junk results.

And actually, if you misspell a word, Kagi will suggest that alternative, too.

> I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what I tell it to.

Like search for things you did not search for...?

Have you never copied and pasted an error code into Google and have it return zero or only 1 or 2 results?

It’s terrible but far better than getting 100’s of irrelevant results because Google decided two words out of 10 in your query were the only ones that matter.

I actually have had this happen and it's infuriating.

I've had queries of copy+pasted errors with zero results, but playing around with it a bit just to find a github result that was only like two words off.

> it’s terrible but far better than getting 100’s of irrelevant results because

Surely the similarity to the one on github would still have it ranked on the first page?

You are confusing search and text generation.

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