these days i find myself yearning to type "Beatles abbey rd" and find only "Beatles abbey rd"

storystarling 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I learned this the hard way on a book platform I'm working on. While semantic search is useful for discovery, we found that prioritizing exact matches is critical. It seems users get pretty frustrated if they type a specific title and get a list of conceptually similar results instead of the actual book. We ended up having to tune the ranking to heavily favor literal string matches over the vector distance to keep people from bouncing.

▲

fsckboy 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

everything you are saying rings perfectly true to me but there's an additional problem I encounter. (i'm going to make up my example because i'm lazy to check but you'll get the idea) say you want to look up "Alexander the Great"...

...God help you if Brad Pitt and or the Jonas Brothers ever played a role with exactly that name-match. The web and search (and the culture?) have become super biased toward video especially commercial offerings, and the sorting ranked by popularity means pages and pages of virtually identical content about that which you are not interested in.

▲

digiown 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Related but I wish Wikipedia would provide a filter against movies, music, pop culture related topics. They take up a huge amount of the namespace for things for whatever reason and often directs me to unintended pages.

	▲	cess11 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=melancholia+-mov...

▲

drsalt 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

why did you have to learn this the hard way?

▲

qingcharles 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember eBay 30 years ago when it would showed you whatever you typed in. Compared to 2026 where it only shows you everything except the thing you typed in.

▲

Manfred 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Especially with small datasets it’s more important to be exact at the expense of a user having to fix a typo.