Recently I started seeing more and more often the dreaded “Search operators were not applied Too few matches were found”. I want to see the results it gives, not the result I was not searching for. If it’s zero results, then just say so, giving irrelevant results only makes it worse. The worst part is the wording, “Too few matches were found”, how many is “too few”? Because if it found even one result, that’s most likely the one I was searching for.
So is there a way to force brave to use those operators? Because I used them for a reason!
@frygg when it says too few matches were found, that’s Brave’s way of saying there are absolutely no results it could match based on those terms. They just have chosen to at least show results as close to the terms as possible rather than an empty page.
OK, but this is really weird, for experiment I tried to search “ave of spades”, it’s a really common accidental and intentional typo. It can be found on Instagram, Facebook, X… even on Wikipedia(German page on “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (EP)”. All of which are clearly indexed by brave, why do I still get "Too few matches were found”? Will it find the result now that I mentioned it on Brave forum?
[Edit] and only few minutes later it started to give out a single result from mapquest.
I’ve found the reason, it’s VPN! Without a VPN I can’t find a single result on “ave of spades”, even if I turn “all regions” and disable local results. I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think there’s a law against typos in my country, especially for a non-native language like English. So why Brave is limiting searches like that?
I just used Brave Browser (iOS) and Brave Search, criteria:
“Ave of spades” NOT "ace of spades"
That eliminated most of the "ace of spades" results, but did not find an exact match for “Ave of spades”.
When, at the bottom of the first page of search results, I chose to click the button to go to the second page of search results, the Cloudflare Cops intervened:
@frygg perhaps not as common as you think? Again, Brave doesn’t have huge crawlers like Google does. While they say they do have their own crawler, much of the data “crawled” is gathered by users who have opted into Web Discovery Project. Looking back, it seems I didn’t link this to you. If you’re not familiar with it, check out https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-What-is-the-Web-Discovery-Project
I also am not certain how many “hits” have to show for them to say it’s no longer “too few results.” But I do know they show what they can so long as it seems to be relevant.
I’m going to tag in @jlop to see if he might be able to stop by and answer on this. He’s part of Search team but know he doesn’t pop into Community much. But hopefully my tagging will bring him in and he can give some more relevant ideas.
