I'm not trying to fix search so what's the tldr on why it's so hard to do with such constrained databases? The Nintendo one seems insanely egregious. Is this not just a symptom of corporate laziness rather than search problem complexity?
Search is hard because you need to anticipate and model the language of all potential searchers and the content.
There’s also lots of ambiguity because you’ll only get one or two keywords from the searcher without any other context, and you need to take into account trends and content quality and metadata.
Also, in lots of cases search is bad because the product team either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.