This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Previously: Relevance (2)
Instead of painstakingly grabbing the absolute best matches for your query to then rank those with infinite precision, one time saving strategy has search engines go for “close enough”.
Painstaking Precision

Given all the time, money and resources in the world, here’s what we’d normally do.
Word by word you go through a search. You look in your documents and see which has word one…. word two… word three…. You get the picture.



