> an autocomplete has one chance to reorder per keystroke. if you got it wrong and you have a better ordering a bit later you must “swallow the sadness” (as per the original author of this wisdom) but never change already displayed items
+1000. I forget which search -- it's probably macOS Spotlight -- drives me batty with this daily.
Firefox has a related misdesign. If you type a word which matches both a search keyword and a history item, the search keyword takes precedence -- which is nonsensical, since I've typed nothing (not even a space) following the search keyword. So e.g. I have a `cpp` keyword to search `en.cppreference.com`; typing `cp`+Enter brings up `en.cppreference.com`, as does `cppr`+Enter, but `cpp`+Enter does a search for an empty string.
Just wanted to comment in agreement and confirm that this exact scenario drives me insane. Adding more information that agrees with the existing top suggestion should never change that top suggestion.
It shows a Google result for "Monica" whoever the hell that is, plus driving directions to somewhere, plus settings, plus results from my emails, plus results from my messages, plus every Easter Monday since the dawn of time from my calendar, plus a whole load of photos it decided were relevant... everything except Monzo.
Now I have to type 'z' to get Monzo to display again
type 'for' - forums.overclockers.co.uk appears, this is where I'm going, I go here once on most days
type 'forums', because my fingers didn't get the memo to stop - forums.samygo.tv appears at the top, a site I haven't visited (on purpose) in almost a decade, mostly because I don't have that tv any more.
Sorting by frequency/recency looks like the culprit. You often type 'for' and select forums.overclockers.co.uk, so the engine takes that into account and prioritizes that candidate, but you haven't done the same when typing 'forums', so it falls back on its normal sorting algorithm.
Seems that if a program has frequency/recency sorting, it'd best have an additional layer of intelligence such that it checks what results would've been returned by other substrings of your search term.
Or just key the frequency on the item clicked, not the term used to get there. If I use something a lot, it should generally take precedence over other possible matches.
On the other side it is rational if you think about it in abstract where there is no latency between screen and keyboard input.
The likely reason you continued typing is that the prompt didn't include what you wanted.
I can see it as rational from a number of viewpoints - "When user types 'fo' they want to go here, 'foru' usually results in this, 'forum' has this result etc etc.
But I think all those other viewpoints lead to less desirable behaviour, for me. I'm not going to pretend it's universal because I don't have the research, but it pisses me off.
Can someone please tell the Windows Start Menu designers? Have completely ruined the experience as it constantly juggles items as its heuristics are seemingly updated. I especially enjoy how Bing results get prioritized over local applications and files.
But most of all it doesn’t seem to be deterministic. Very often I get a different behavior on the second attempt.
Search in windows puzzles me. Like I don’t get why it takes so long to search files in explorer, while traversing the same folder structure programmatically takes milliseconds. Hard computer science problem!
I am not even sure it's the case. In explorer options, search, both "include compressed files" and "always search file names and content" are unchecked by default. And from the behaviour it seems to only search file names indeed.
I suspect it has more to do to explorer registering something with the file system to be notified if any of the folders being searched change or something like that. Something completely useless in any case, I'd much rather it doesn't do anything smart and gives me a result instantaneously.
That can be desirable if the filesystem path to Photos includes a directory named something like "storage". Of course it should still prioritize apps that actually have "stor" in the name, but maybe you didn't have any?
One can only hope that this thread finds a way onto some responsible MS employee monitor.
Yeah, MS is not good at search, but I think having one engineer tackle windows search for over all these years would have brought us instant and relevant search results.
How many times I have to find the right keyword to find something I KNOW is there but that satisfies the search engine is more than I want to recount.
> an autocomplete has one chance to reorder per keystroke. if you got it wrong and you have a better ordering a bit later you must “swallow the sadness” (as per the original author of this wisdom) but never change already displayed items
[1]: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1470751551568363530