Wouldn’t it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for “this is my phrase” rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?

There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website’s search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:

  1. The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
  2. They’re just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don’t think it’s worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.

Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?

Cheers!

EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I’m mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don’t seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.

  • NeatNit
    10·
    4 months ago

    I don’t know the answer but I can tell you two things:

    1. It has often been beneficial to me when the search query wasn’t taken literally, it’s not always a bad thing. Many searches are ones where the user doesn’t know exactly what they’re looking for. Granted, that’s definitely not always the case. That said, I don’t remember ever catching it outright ignore stuff like quoted words/phrases.
    2. Regarding “save resources”, Google introduced Instant Search in 2010 which started showing results as you type, thus creating an ungodly amount of extra load on their servers since each user search now created multiple queries. They clearly have no trouble scaling up resources.