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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

The biggest reason I immediately switched to Google when I first tried it was Google only matched documents containing exactly the words I searched for, nothing more.

It's fine (and good) if search engines add more intelligence like this, but I'll always need a way to search for exact phrases. The default behavior of Google is much "fuzzier" than it was 5 years ago, so I'm surprised they don't already do something like this (or do they?)

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That's a good point. It's sometimes difficult trying to search for programming topics now. "Did you mean UIView?" No, Google, I really did mean NSView.

"Did you mean" is just a suggestion. It doesn't change your search results AFAIK.

If it's confident enough, it does.

Yes but that's a different message ("Showing results for..."), and there's a link to force a search for the original term. For me it's right at least 50% of the time that it does this (probably much more, but I can confidently say >50%), so it's a net win for me personally.

You are right, I remembered wrong for that one. It usually does "Showing results for ... UIView click here to see results for ... NSView". Sometimes I encounter something that gets changed without the option to search for what I typed and I have to quote it.

Google has "verbatum" search. It is a little hidden under the "more search tools" link in the sidebar, but it does provide a non-fuzzy search.

Or just wrap your term(s) in quotes.

Which is still fuzzy sometimes.

Is it? I think it avoids whitespace and punctuation, but it's pretty easy to get no search results using quotes.

You can wrap your search terms in " (double quotes), but they also offer a verbatim search options, which deactivates most fuzziness.

https://sites.google.com/site/gwebsearcheducation/advanced-o...

You are looking for intext:

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