@hrefna @futurebird there is also this vast disconnect - a lot of search engines and people broadly seem to think that there is a single “rightl answer to any given query.

When, j would argue, in nearly all cases there is not. That every query (and the person making the query) has a context which may or may not be known to the search engine and which can make the best answer/link for their context differ from others.

This is true even if seemingly obvious questions “how many hours in a day?”

@Rycaut

I'm becoming increasingly resigned to the fact that I'm going to need to write my own search engine.

It was never reasonable to expect any service much less a free one to really do full text search; the data are too big.

That's the sad truth behind all this suggesting & dumbing down of results. Sometimes even species names get "corrected" to something more popular.

But if I want to be able to have everything I've read and written searchable I'm just gonna need to do it myself.

@futurebird yup. For my local content Apple’s built in search is halfway decent but doesn’t get anything like my posts here or elsewhere unless I figure out a way to archive them locally (which wouldn’t be a half-bad idea to figure out though non-trivial)

I do wish there was search that trusted users enough to default to searching for the exact query vs trying to mangle it (autocomplete on iOS and on desktops doesn’t help)

@Rycaut @futurebird
Big Same to this whole thread.

I've made inroads, but have more work to switch my writing to a POSSE workflow:

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/posse-comitatus-twitter-as-a-syndication-engine/

A personal search engine will be a crucial piece of this.

On the theme of programmers being of service to regular folks in community, I've also been wondering how to make this accessible to non-techies. Besides if it's simple and comprehensible then I might not weary of maintaining it for myself, so those align nicely.