Pardon my intrusion, but I think there's the necessity of toning down the discussion a bit. To be fair it is irrelevant where user A or user B works and I don't see any hostility in this discussion except the one from the blog's author. If the aim is doing Science, let's do this peacefully! I think the main problem that generated this discussion is the form of some sentences of the blog "As someone who has a Ph.D. in Human-computer Interaction ;-), I feel like I am entitled to define a condition of "good" in relevance here. I hereby declare that:

A good top-K algorithm should rank a document containing more user query terms higher than a document containing less number of user query terms. This makes perfect sense. Right?" This should have been changed in: "For the sake of this blog post I am interested in a simplified relevance concept: more query terms matched -> more relevance" In this way the blog would have not caused the outburst of (correct) indignation of the Information Retrieval community, that has been working for years on the topic, and knows very well how much complex is relevance.

That's the problem right there. The so called "Information Retrieval Community" does not seem to care about what users want, and they treat their users in a condescending way, ignoring an obvious problem for years, as clearly demonstrated here and elsewhere.

Why should I care about what they think? In the end of the day, they are serving the users. They are either going to be left behind, or they have to change.

For example, the newer search engines, such us, https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch, also do what T-Wand does. Users are going to vote by their feet. The "information retrieval community" be damned. It's as simple as that. Got it?

And change they will. What "information retrieval community" are you talking about? Just a bunch of fresh graduates who just got their PH.D, and some college students. That's about it. I don't see any IR professors coming out defending them.

The "hostility" I referred to was the one towards the users. Basically, he's demanding users to show evidence that whatever they want is better than BM25.

That's just wrong. Period. This is the reason I mention his job, because his job requires him to listen to the users, instead of taking something he learned in school and use that to talk condescendingly to his users. That's not gonna fly.

Given this context, I think whatever I said it is entirely appropriate.

Yes for sure! I agree. I mean no disrespect myself, the algorithm seems useful and I wish the author all the best. I know, from personal experience, having your work commented on can be stressful.

I'm just trying to understand what the author meant and their intention for anyone that might revisit this thread later. I think what you're saying sounds plausible as an interpretation.