[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is there a search engine that performs "Exac...
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       Ask HN: Is there a search engine that performs "Exact Search"?
        
       Google tries to figure out what you might mean and then return
       appropriate results, but sometimes I want an exact search. Even
       putting quotation marks around the phrase doesn't work reliably.
       The same is largely true of DDG as well.  So ... what do you use
       when you want to do an "exact search" on the web?  Edit: In reply
       to a couple of comments ... I don't have a recent example to hand,
       and recent attempts have failed to reproduce the exact behaviour.
       Also, of course, Google tries to customise search results, so my
       example of a screw-up might behave perfectly for you. But I will
       keep trying to get an reproducable example, and would welcome
       examples from anyone else.  Edit 2: Example: I have open in another
       tab a specific web page, and from it I have copy/pasted "So a germ
       of an idea is enough" into Google, which fails to find it. Another
       phrase from that page _is_ found, so the page has been indexed.
       Indeed, if I use the  "site:" qualifier, it does find the
       reference. This is not _exactly_ the behaviour I recently saw and
       was asking about, but it 's close enough to be of interest.
        
       Author : ColinWright
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2021-09-12 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | f_allwein wrote:
       | I never had a case when Google with quotes did not work as
       | intended. Can you give an example?
        
         | brudgers wrote:
         | I am glad it works on your machine.
         | 
         | Happens to me not infrequently in the long tail.
        
         | ColinWright wrote:
         | I've edited the question to be more specific.
        
       | brudgers wrote:
       | [a crude speculative outline]
       | 
       | No. Because to a first approximation, it is not possible in
       | practice.
       | 
       | Results returned are best effort. Best effort is largely limited
       | by latency.
       | 
       | At the scale of the entire web, parts of the index will be
       | absolutely inaccessible due to partitioning and practically
       | inaccessible because they are sitting on disk (or simply don't
       | exist because they wouldn't fit into memory) or are so far away
       | that they can't reliably be returned within the limits of
       | acceptable latency -- e.g. on a server in Japan for a London
       | query (and anyway how likely is relevance of Japanese results?).
       | 
       | I mean maybe there are results for the "site" qualifier in memory
       | on the server your query hits and maybe their aren't. Either way,
       | Google's going to return results in 250ms if that's the
       | performance target. Either way Google's not going to spin for
       | twenty minutes or seconds it would take to crawl the site,
       | process the results, and build the inverted index.
       | 
       | Everything is engineered. The engineering is guided by
       | statistics. But so is performance. Sometimes better information
       | is close by in hot memory. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes
       | bandwidth is saturated. Sometimes your cell service is slow.
       | 
       | That's probably why HN uses Algolia even though it costs money.
        
       | ryan-duve wrote:
       | Do you mind adding an example of the behavior you're describing
       | either here or in the OP? I feel like I've seen what you're
       | describing but every quoted term I search for gets exact matches.
        
         | ColinWright wrote:
         | I've edited the question to be more specific.
        
       | thoughtstheseus wrote:
       | People sharing names with celebs?
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-12 23:01 UTC)