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I've been wondering for the longest time why I can't ever seem to find what I'm looking for when I search for questions on askbot.org. I think I finally figured it out.

I was doing a search for "feedback captcha" to see if anyone else has posted a feature request to add a captcha to the feedback form for anonymous users.

As expected, the search results were hit-and-miss. Some were on target, most were completely unrelated. But then I noticed something: none of the posts in the search results contained both "feedback" and "captcha"; each search hit referenced only one of the search terms.

I ran a quick experiment to test my hypothesis:

• "feedback captcha" - 51 results
• "feedback" - 46 results
• "captcha" - 6 results

This is counter-intuitive behavior for search. Adding more words to a search query makes it more specific, so it should result in fewer search results.

Using the above example, Suggestions for antispam measures? was the only question that matched both search terms — that should have been the only result when I searched for "feeback captcha".