Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34692373 — February 2023, 16 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552460 — March 2020, 43 comments

> The conversion to a query is not simply a matter of pulling out the text strings and turning them into AND expressions, although that is part of it.

heh, that's kinda what uFuzzy [0] does, but it can also compose a regexp that simulates a Damerau-Levenshtein distance [1] of 1 :)

[0] https://github.com/leeoniya/uFuzzy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damerau%E2%80%93Levenshtein_di...

I built one of the first national search engines in the Netherlands around this approach around 1999, called Search.NL. I’ve placed the code on GitHub for posterities sake. The code doesn’t doesn’t compile anymore.

https://github.com/hcfman/nextrieve

History has pretty much forgotten this except for a single page

https://www.eindhovenfotos.nl/1/ilse.nl.html

On that note. I just added it to archive.is