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Re:HN Search Updated by nkurz on Saturday January 25, 2014 @02:46AM (#7120199)
false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian

Those aren't false positives, those are additional helpful results in case you accidentally typed "Don Delillo" instead of "Delicious don't" or "dealloc done". I know I do that all the time!

Unhelpful sarcasm aside, it's nice that the results that contain the actual search are at least above the non-results. But I really don't like trend of search engines to include results that don't include any of the search terms above results that contain some of them. If you search for just "Delillo", you'll come up with a lot of results that are probably relevant to the user's intention.

Offering "If you didn't find what you were looking, maybe you meant:" alternatives could be helpful, but if not hidden (preferable), at the least these results should be clearly delineated from the actual matches. Google's approach of showing certain terms with a strike-through is the minimum I'd accept happily.

edit: Yuck, when I wrote this I hadn't even realized that it keeps loading non-relevant results in an endless scroll.

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