It’s not just websites; search does not work anywhere. Not in email. Not for the local filesystem. Not in calendars or notes. And search is not all that hard, contrary to what you have been told. One developer alone writes a search tool that’s better than any other one I’ve used and works absolutely flawlessly. So it can be done.
For some reason, these companies just do not want to have working search. In most cases, I can’t even imagine why.
Now they’re just targeted sales funnels that slot searchers into market segments and are designed to spit out results to the searcher accordingly depending on the advertisers paying for search placement, & to discourage searchers from any action that would lead them not to buy products targeted at them.
This carries over to email; your filesystem, calendars, and notes.
If you’re idiosyncratic in any way, it’s annoying, even with ad-blocks.
An entity that collects as much broad cross-referential information about you is never as “helpful” or benign as the one in
Cat Pictures Please.
That’s part of it, at least for the larger sites, but search in Windows has always been terrible. (And has admittedly gotten worse due to the imperative for ad sales, data thievin’ and market segmentation.) A lot of it is just simple incompetence. Writing a decent search is not beyond what I could do if I tried, but is beyond a lot of people who are hired to do this and should be able to do it.
And that is true of a lot of areas of life.
True. I have never liked search in Mac either, though. Microsoft has no incentive to hire anyone who could write a decent search now anyways. It owns Bing and has been pushing cloud services for years and now AI (shudders).
I’m not sure why it was bad between MS-DOS and integrated everything except –not caring enough to hire people who could write it? Even given that a lot of systems are just organized on top of older systems? “The duplicate file because you can’t find it” problem isn’t even driving the impetus to upgrade computers with more memory and storage, necessarily.
Mac search is pretty terrible too, and difficult to use. Also, slow. Search in Linux is a little better depending on the distro but also no picnic.
I think, mostly, no one cared about search back even to the Win 3.11 days and before. It’s not flashy. It didn’t sell anything (but does now, so it’s broken in other ways). And it was probably the scutwork the worse intern got assigned to.