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Comment by underwater | Hacker News Reader

But it’s clearly not what people want. Ask any person if a search for a hex encoded ID should be a fuzzy match for a different ID and the answer will be no.

As technical people, it’s easy to infer what’s happening under the hood and make excuses for the weirdness. But food product design is about having strong opinions about what should happen, and ignoring our bias is around the limitations of the tech or the status quo.

In an age where I can have an entire conversation with a computer or generate a video from text the world’s greatest search engine still doesn’t understand that you can’t fuzzy match an ID? It increasingly feels like Google search is stuck in the past.

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Who is this "any person" who's searching for random hex, and how much do you think they care of Google shows them a car instead of whatever thing they're not even actually looking for?

the idea that this mythical "any person" even cares about the difference between a useless car result and a page that says no results and then they just move on with their lives is projecting a lot of your own biases onto a hypothetical.

Obviously no one would search a completely random hex, but it may represent an ID somewhere, and they want to find out more information about it. e.g. a SHA or MD5 hash.

Agreed, you can look up d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e for example. The question is how critical is it that Google returns a non-useful result vs a page that says there are no results. I think most people don't care, it's not useful either way.

As an aside, for those curious, it's the MD5 of the empty string :)

I search id's all the time. Google is becoming more and more worthless.

> But it’s clearly not what people want. Ask any person if a search for a hex encoded ID should be a fuzzy match for a different ID and the answer will be no. >

in a search field explicitly for hex encoded IDs it shouldn't be

In a generic web search that has to guess if my term was a hex encoded id ('cafe' is but almost certainly isn't intended as one..).. it's less obvious.

in the case of a clear hex encoded id of sufficient length, i would like to know there are zero exact results, but as long as it's still fast I would love some fuzzy matches after in case there was a typo in my term or in the indexed document.

>the world’s greatest search engine still doesn’t understand that you can’t fuzzy match an ID?

No, not without telling it to run an Exact Match search by enclosing the string in quotes.

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