this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Why is the search function so broken? (hexbear.net)
submitted 7 months ago by gay_king_prince_charles@hexbear.net to c/hexbear@hexbear.net
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Whenever I've used the search function, it returns almost nothing relevant to what I'm looking for, and the time constraints don't work. If I look for things using the "top (time)" feature, I always get results outside of the desired time period. Why does this happen, is a fix in progress, and how hard would it be to implement?

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[–] Edie@hexbear.net 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

The search is basic. As far as I can tell FunkyStuff is wrong in regards to "the words can be in a completely different order", no it has to be in order. But two things:

  1. The words can be surrounded by any number of letters, so long as the word itself is found it is satisfied. So searching for "un", " unoriginal" will satisfy it.
  2. While the words have to be in order, there can be any number of words in between. So searching for "the things", the first paragraph of this comment would satisfy that search. As you can see, "the" is the very first word, and "things" is the very last word in that paragraph.
[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 6 points 7 months ago

Oops, yeah I mixed up order vs being contiguous.

[–] d_cagno@hexbear.net 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'll add that doing search well is a lot of work; just about anything you would do to "improve" it will introduce some drawback as well. I'm sure the lemmy devs just haven't had the time or inclination to focus on it past the basic functionality.

[–] gay_king_prince_charles@hexbear.net 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah, I doubt I could put in a meaningful PR for search itself, but maybe the chronological filter bug might be easier to tackle.

[–] gay_king_prince_charles@hexbear.net 2 points 7 months ago

That's very silly