What's with big tech companies changing all searches to be fuzzy? FB Marketplace is now like this too. It's impossible to search for anything, it gives unrelated results at least half the time.
Fuzzy search - complex, incomprehensible. Gets the user where YOU want them. Lets you waste their time and bandwidth. More ad opportunities. Allows you to discourage searches you don't want. Dissuades annoying power users that are less likely to fall for your schemes. Near-useless, but creates a LOT of value out of nothing. Extremely frustrating to use, but think of the money. The perfect choice for any reasonable company in 2026.
Until we all quit, which we won't because, what is better than not accessing good information?
I’ve done searches for an exact video that I know the title of and have been unable to find it. The search is useless.
Probably because it maximizes usage time, so more ads are served.
If the user gets what he's looking for as the first result, he spends hardly any time on the site. If the site never delivers the right results, the user will stop using.
Optimal enshitification happens when the user spends as much time as possible without forcing him to quit.
Even Google search is spewing out hot garbage a lot of the time. Prabhakar Raghavan's internal sabotage of the engine that started 2019 never seemed to have stopped, it just got worse.