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Re:Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem? by sh4z on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @04:33AM (#17301317)
So would you have rather got results with only 'storename' and not 'return policy', or no results at all, or what's the problem here?

If there was a result containing the whole search string it would (I believe) have been the first one.

Re:Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem? by pm215 on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @04:43AM (#17301367)
If you don't have any results for the query, then return a page saying so. Otherwise you're annoying the user by making them scan through a page of irrelevant text to confirm that it really is all irrelevant. When this happens to me my reaction is "don't just ignore what I said to you", which is as infuriating when a computer does it as when a human does.
Re:Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem? by jonbarker on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @11:14AM (#17303837)
Google returns results specifically showing which terms were missing if this were the case for me. This is useful for finding articles with intersections of concepts (assuming I got the terminology/jargon right) and knowing when those probably don't exist, so I like the feature.
Re:Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem? by nikanj on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @04:39AM (#17301348)
This being relatively large chain store, I'm quite certain there should be forum posts or reddit discussions about their return policy. I have no way of proving they exist, seeing as how Google is shit at finding stuff.

"So what's the problem here"? The problem is, the search engine threw away one third of my query terms, and then gave me all chaff. Apparently I should've thrown in some random punctuation to convince it to actually use all of them.

Re:Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem? by ma2rten on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @09:47AM (#17302970)
Can you just tell the name of the store? I want to see for example what happens if I select verbatim mode.
Re:Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem? by severine on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @12:17PM (#17304477)
Example with Target, in DDG, verbatim: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22target%22+%22return+policy%22&t...

Seems to work.