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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that Claude's search is so bad. I've got months of random sessions in Claude, but if I try to search them for a phrase, it searches for any word that looks like any word within that phrase rather than the phrase itself

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ChatGPT/Codex is equally bad (if not worse). Which is very surprising. Indexing words is a solved problem. It would be trivially easy to provide a useful semantic search. I can only surmise that they prefer people start new chats instead of re-opening old chats.

The best way around this is a project folder like "Personal" or something contextual, then getting Claude to record everything into md files with semantic indexing. It doesn't require too much space. Just a little background processing.

The first thing people forget in fast moving fields is all the ways their predecessors already solved basic comp sci problems successfully.

Also, occasionally in slow moving fields. Exhibit: Windows search after XP.

If you've ever worked with talented, but younger, colleagues, you'll see this. Something about our industry, or maybe the kind of person in it, where individual brilliance seems always to be more prioritised than collective endeavour and progress.

Also see basic computer security which was not in place so Anthropic's buggy software (refusing to call it "rogue" agents) hacked into various websites

If their security was so poor, why haven't frontier lab weights leaked yet?

Because egress and ingress security are two different things?

They've since implemented permanent no expiration cache for logged in users so... Either they don't prefer new chats, or this it their really indirect way of discouraging it

They're improving it 30000 times a day!

By an overly apologetic employee that keeps making the same mistake..

> Sorry that turned out to be wrong, let me fix that... [Does it wrong in a different way] -- Claude

Don't worry, the fool with the tool is the fool, not the tool so I'll gladly take the blame since I'd rather have the tool than do without.

You’ll have a much better time asking Claude to search for it.

It feels wasteful but it works.

One person's waste is another person's wealth.

I suspect it's because they have no incentive to fix it, people will spend tokens searching using Claude rather than doing it themselves for free.

How many people are spending tokens on this in a way that is valuable to Anthropic? Free user tokens are a cost; subscriber tokens are either a cost or neutral, unless they cause the user to hit their limit AND this causes the user to buy a more expensive plan. And each customer they annoy might go to a competitor. So I think they almost certainly have an incentive to fix this, unless almost nobody cares about it.

Good to know it's not just me.

All of them are bad. It's unhinged.

I use deja-vu to search across all my harnesses history.

Imagine if that simple search is observably so bad, how bad are the search capabilities you can't inspect? Like their web search

I hope they didn't implement web search themselves and are using bing api or so under the hood.

For a company that just bragged about inventing a new source control tool, I'm not sure that I'd trust that they use an off the shelf web search tool

Their been search is very good, I think GPT-6 just brute forces it, it probably takes the top results from Bing, all 20 or so of them and sends it all as context to the model, before generating its answer.

No shit, they want you to burn tokens. Any efficient use of computation on your side is a threat to their business model.

You say this like it's obvious, but I don't see the logic. When free users waste tokens, this costs Anthropic money. When subscribers waste tokens, this probably also tends to cost Anthropic money; the only way it benefits them is if it causes the user to buy a more expensive plan (or open a second paid account). If you or your company are paying per token, then sure... but is the amount of money they're making via this kind of wastage really enough to outweigh the risk of driving users away?

Ask claude to find it. I'm serious. It works quite well.

Then you have another residue session in the history.

The only reason they don't add search is specifically because they want you to waste those tokens like that. It's ridiculous.

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