Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Search interfaces
Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 16 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Search silently drops common words, so exact phrases return nothingUnreviewed
20092026- Search silently drops common words, so exact phrases return zero results2025-04-23
- Searching in English returns unrelated content2024-04-18
- Search ignores quoted phrases, forcing several queries to find content2021-03-29
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 15 complaints
- Search silently drops common words, so exact phrases return zero results2025-04-23
- Searching in English returns unrelated content2024-04-18
- Custom search interfaces end up complicated and hard to use, with less power than SQL2022-10-18
- Users pick the wrong search box when several look alike on screen2021-10-14
- Search ignores quoted phrases, forcing several queries to find content2021-03-29
- Search interface is vastly inferior to the browser find-on-page that people already use2019-05-29
- Returns 10+ results in random order, hard to find the answer2017-11-29
- Search box is hidden or must be expanded before use, which is annoying2015-08-16
- Fuzzy matching returns unwanted results and users can't get exact matching2015-04-24
- Multiple dropdowns updating on every keystroke are annoying and get in the way2014-04-07
- Searching for "Draft" returned nothing, though the site later showed it first2014-01-11
- Search that rejects misspellings is irritating and painful to use on phones2012-12-13
- Search struggles to understand context, so people find things hard to get online2011-01-24
- Descriptive searches fail to locate a book the person remembers2009-09-14
- "More services" button dumps all services onto screen, forcing scrolling2009-03-17