> But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms.
Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.
Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.