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Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the kind words. Long time HN member here like you (going on 11 years) that recently started working on Search as a SWE.

Yes, that meme is very common. I hope I can contribute positively to these discussions by offering an outlet for feedback, and humanizing our organization. Google’s Search organization is large, so it’s certainly not monolithic, but we’re staffed with a bunch of normal, hardworking, genuine human beings like most companies, that care about the impact we’re having.

I’m happy you’ve found some value in our discussion. :)

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There are cases where Google doesn't return anything close to all known exact matches.

1. Most large classic forums using vbulletin. Try picking any rare word or phrase with less than 100 total matches via the forum's search tool and compare to the Google verbatim results.

2. This very site, searching for an uncommon word such as "memeplex" returns hundreds of unique results according to hn.algolia.com, but only 65 according to Google via site:news.ycombinator.com "memeplex".

3. Fanfiction sites such as fanfiction.net . Try randomly picking an obscure 'fandom' with only a few hundred stories, and search for the name of one of the main protagonists. It will only retrieves a small fraction of all the existing stories that mention the protagonist's name.

EDIT: I originally had another example involving macrumors.com but then realized there was a formatting mistake in the search query.

Hey Michael, I appreciate the effort you put into describing a few examples:

1. If you could link to specific examples and queries that’d be super helpful for someone like me that’s not active on the forums you’re describing.

2. Algolia is a fuzzy matching search engine. Searching for memeplex [1] returns matches like “megaplex”, “memepher”, “meeples”, etc. Unchecking typo tolerance in the settings returns < 100 results in line with Google’s results.

3. Again, if you could link to specific examples and queries that’d be helpful.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=19&prefix=true&qu...

Thanks for looking into it Denzel.

I'm not quite sure what you mean for 2., I see every exact match highlighted in a rectangular box in a different color. Do you not see that on your end?

Just counting the exact matches, there are well over 100 unique results.

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