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One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.


Off the top if my head I can think of two reasons.

1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search.

2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)


"Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.


Search the same thing rephrased slightly differently 5 times to find the right result, and I can show you 5 sets of ads related closely to the topic of your search.


Because you can't implement that with efficient data structures like posting lists.




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