@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
@Rycaut

if it's just things you write and you scrape your accounts' posts as you write them, you can probably use elasticsearch. but that only works going forward, finding all your old posts would be harder

(though you could probably use ES to search your Twitter etc archive)

I'm not deeply familiar with ES but I'm pretty sure this is what it's meant for, though getting the data into the right shape might take work