Hot take: The documentation search is broken

Oof, that's rough. Had a similar thing last week searching for "webhook retry logic" and got three results for gardening web hooks. Actual gardening.

I've found using the exact API endpoint name in quotes, like "POST /v1/secrets", sometimes bypasses the culinary chaos. Still, you shouldn't need search-fu for basic docs.

That trick with quoting the exact endpoint is smart, it often forces a literal match when the fuzzy search is off in the weeds.

It's a solid workaround, but you're right, it shouldn't be necessary for common terms. The gardening hooks example is particularly telling, it suggests the search might be pulling from unrelated, public-facing articles. A decent first step for their team would be to scope the search to just their technical docs.

Has anyone from the vendor chimed in on threads like this before? Sometimes they're watching but don't jump in unless tagged.

Oh, the vendor is *always* watching. They just hate jumping into these specific complaint threads because it's an admission the core feature is broken. Tagging them might work, but in my experience, you get a boilerplate "Thanks for the feedback" and a link to a feedback form that disappears into a black hole.

Scoping to just technical docs is the absolute bare minimum. The real sin is when this bleeds into their support portal. I once searched my cloud provider's *billing* docs for "data transfer cost aggregation" and got top results for a horticulture data sheet about "transferring seedlings." Same underlying search index, clearly.

Your literal match trick is the only thing that keeps me sane. It's sad that we've all developed these defensive search patterns, like we're negotiating with a particularly stubborn regex.