As somebody who worked on search engines in the past, I think there are contradictory requirements from different people. Some people only vaguely know what the

As somebody who worked on search engines in the past, I think there are contradictory requirements from different people. Some people only vaguely know what they want, and want the search engine to be smart and give them as broad field as possible, and if it doesn't, they call it "dumb". Some people need very precise thing in a sea of similarly looking things, and they need the engine to be strict, up to following the exact word order and keeping "filler" words in (looking for "to be or not to be" with common words filter on might be hard :) and so on. And if the engine is not strict enough, they call it "full of junk". It's very hard to find the right balance between the two, especially if you don't build per-user profiles. I'm not saying there aren't solutions but it's a very tricky business with a lot of failure modes.