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Why do many search engines seem to ignore operators (e.g. exact phrases, term exclusions, OR, etc.)? Is there a good reason for having a dumb 1997-level search logic that I'm not seeing? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

56 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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:

The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
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.

(page 2) 8 comments

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's because websites interpret those characters differently because of how coding requires using the physical qwerty keyboard. Essentially ">" gets used as a compator operator in programming languages, which means that it's used as a tool to instructs the computer how to do things. When we need to display the symbol, we use ">" as an "escaped character" which basically means treat it as the symbol, not the instruction set. Often search engines will use a very powerful tool called a regular expression which looks like this for phone numbers: ^(\d{3})\s\d{3}-\d{4}

And each character represents something, ^ means start with. \d means digit { means 3 of whatever's in front of me }. Breaking apart the search parameters is pretty complex and it needs to happen FAST, so at a certain point the developers just throw away things that can be a security concern like special characters like &^|`"'* specially because they can be used to maliciously attack the search engine.

For other characters: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp

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