Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search
I am frustrated that fuzzy search implementations on Hacker News and many other sites are failing users by ignoring exact matches. Even when an exact match option exists, it is often buried and difficult to find. Having run a site with heavy search usage, I agonized over this issue and never sacrificed exact match functionality for the sake of fuzzy matching.
- mmargenot
Gmail's search on mobile, where things come up in the quick results only to disappear when I complete the search, is a millstone about my neck.
- leros
HackerNews search respects double quotes around your terms as an exact match, as do many other search engines.
For example search for "Amerca" with and without quotes. Without quotes you get content for "America" but with quotes you only get the exact typo match.
- tetris11
Quotes should be enough to trigger an exact search. How we regressed from this is beyond me
- lukan
Spotify's fuzzy search makes me want to do pirating again. Looking for a non mainstream artist can be really hard at times for no good reason than to appeal to the dumb average user. I even tried to build my own spotify player and going over the API - same shit (allmost).
- rahulmax
From a UX perspective, try exact first, then fuzzy. Add an AI-assisted search if you have the patience to build it, and a few bucks for the API cost.
I did the exact + fuzzy pattern on a project and it was so satisfying to watch people finding it useful.
Try it here. https://trustedgyn.com/ (a directory, for public good, hopefully you never have to use.) Make mistakes in the search bar and the model fixes it for you. For folks who are not native english, I found it helps a lot.