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.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    6·
    10 days ago

    For the most part I think they do. I frequently use quoted strings in my search queries (on DDG and Google, I hardly ever use any other search engines) and it usually seems to show me more relevant ones when I do that.

    But in general the WWW is now so big that search engines have been having to become more and more complex (and think for themselves instead of taking the queries very literally) in order to be useful at all.