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Comment by Feathercrown

10 days ago

Autosorting, fuzzy search, document analysis, identifying posts with the same topic, and sentiment analysis all benefit from AI's soft input handling.

13 comments

Feathercrown

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userbinator  10 days ago

fuzzy search

I do NOT want search to become any fuzzier than it already is.

See the great decline of Google's search results, which often don't even have all the words you're asking about and likely omits the one that's most important, for a great example.

  • arkh  10 days ago

    > fuzzy search

    > I do NOT want search to become any fuzzier than it already is.

    For a specialized shop site you may want it. Search term: "something 150", the client is looking for a 1.5m something, if you're doing an exact text search your search engine will give you a lot of noise. Or you'll have to fiddle with synonyms, dictionaries and how you index your products with a huge chance to break other types of search queries.

    • soco  10 days ago

      How many sites will have useful results to return for a "something 150"? Muzzle width? Bees? T-shirt size? Walking distance? You surely cannot want _all_ these categories yet you'll get them all in a list. I might be biased but today's fuzzy search is a dumpster fire, sites hating to return only two results so they bury anything relevant in a tidal wave of unrelated garbage. I have office mates like that and everybody hates them as well.

      4 replies →

  • mrob  10 days ago

    I want both fuzzy search and exact search. Google still has the "I'm feeling lucky" button, so it can support multiple search buttons. It could default to fuzzy search and have an "I'm feeling unlucky" button for exact search.

  • squiggleblaz  10 days ago

    I don't necessarily want search to become any fuzzier than it already is either, but what's happened has happened and I've already responded to the decline of traditional search engines. Nowadays I pretty much only search duckduckgo with site:(something), or else I ask perplexity the question and for some links. Traditional search engines now just give a thousand SEOed-to-death articles, probably generated by ai, from hundreds of pointless third party websites that just have the same basic milk.

    It might be that it's worth it to bifurcate soon. Search indexes and AI engines, doing different roles. The index would have to be sorted with AI though - to focus on original and first-party material and to downrank ad-driving slop.

jayd16  10 days ago

These are fuzz tolerant, not preferred. Stable and high quality results would still be ideal.