alt Hacker News> But fuzzy searches can be extremely useful. Most folks are "fuzzy." > > Google built a pretty huge empire, on simple, fuzzy search.
I was considering whether OP's complaint is an engineer's thing. My conclusion, based on my own experience is, the more your user base tends toward power-users/highly-skilled use cases, the more deterministic your search should be.
A random guy might try to look for a kid's novel series about wizards that sounds like "Happy Fathers". That's when you need Google-level fuzzy search to bridge that gap and suggest "Harry Potter". As a general search engine, Google encounters this a lot.
Same guy asks a librarian, the librarian would instantly know what he's talking about. The Librarian searches the catalog for "Harry Potter" but might misspell it "Harry Poter" or search for "the philosopher's stone" in a US catalog. These cases can be fairly covered by deterministic search methods/classic indexing.
> Harry Potter
Often keeps the same spelling in other countries. Some outliers:
Χάρι Πότερ (Chi as approximation to soft H)
Hare Pota me te Whatu Manapou (written Māori is modern, and it attempts to avoid its foreign roots)
Harrius Potter (Vatican City)
Harijs Poters (Latvia)
Garri Potte (Uzbeki Russki)
Harry's name seems to remain the same in many translations: I assume as part of the overseas marketing of the title.
French changes Snape into Rogue (rogue means haughty and unpleasant), and Dutch turns Dumbledore into Perkamentus (the translator created a new name, and Rowling chose https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/harry-potter-words).
So fuzzy search helps people that don't know English that well.
Edit: When I'm in other countries, I regularly struggle to understand local pronunciation for English names like when someone struggled to tell me who Piratus Draque was, or Cristóbal Colón (Christophorus Columbus). English speaking people are lucky that high-status English has the norm of using people's own original pronounciation and often retains spelling (we butcher some languages more than others, but to me it seems that Spanish butchers all names). Although some get changed on purpose like Kant.