Because it's not semantic search, it's text search. You don't search Discord like you search Google, which is a problem when it is used as a wiki replacement.

It's not even text search. I can know the exact text I'm looking for and get messages that use completely different words just because Discord tries to group related words together when indexing. It's like some lobotomized collated word search, since it doesn't support symbols or quotes either.

Discord's text search is a simple intersection-of-all-words search, with some filters slapped on top. And it's not even the word you typed, it's all words that seem maybe semantically equivalent or similar. When I know the exact word I want to search for (e.g. "loves"), it sucks to always get results for every other related word (e.g. "love", "loved", "loving"). Maybe it'd be a useful feature if it had a toggle, but it doesn't. Some other words that have problems with this are time/times, caring/care, wanting/want/wants, and fucking allowance/allow/allows. Seriously?? Allowance is treated the same as allow??

Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.

THIS. It pisses me off to no end and it seems like something they’re totally uniniterested in fixing.

I assumed some ulterior motive. Did they pick the cheap option?

Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?

My guess is it was better than nothing and they have incredible scale to deal with. (Like millions of messages per second scale.)