why are search functions on certain sites considerably worse than others? (not slower, but rather with way more inaccurate results)
In: 8
Lots of long answers here and I appreciate the knowledge in them. Here’s a shorter version:
There’s not a standard way to search things in computers, and there’s not a standard way to build websites. Every single site organizes its data differently.
Searching stuff in computers is hard. If there’s enough data, you can’t just inspect every word to see if you find matches. Instead, you have to try and build “indexes” that make it easier to find certain things, or other data structures that help.
Some programmers are very talented and come up with good techniques to create high quality search results fast. Other programmers are not so talented and their results are either slower or less high quality. Sometimes the concept of “high quality” isn’t even very clear, and if you can’t describe what you want well in English there is no hope of describing it to a computer in any programming language.
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