Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Semantic search
Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2019–2026), in 6 threads.
People raised many different problems with Semantic search, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
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 8 complaints
- Semantic search forced everywhere with no option to use fuzzy search2026-05-13
- Search interface is so minimal it may be hard for users accustomed to modern web2025-07-22
- Must learn someone else's definitions before searching, which is cumbersome2024-08-21
- Typed queries return results on unrelated topics that don't make sense to the user2024-01-01
- Local semantic search is unusable because indexing takes too much time and compute2023-04-07
- Returns nothing or everything, forcing scanning through many pages2019-04-15
- Search substitutes the user's specific query with an interpreted one2019-04-15
- Ignores the exact word the user typed and returns results it thinks are better2019-04-15