Yeah, I wouldn’t want to completely take away the ability to pinpoint the most recent usage of a specific phrase, it’s just the opposite of what I tend to use search for, so I find it being the assumed goal of search annoying.
Agreed. But even without the title or scoping to the first post, there’s something to be said for volume and concentration of search matches as a heuristic when trying to find the thread about a particular topic rather than just a random mention.
For example, take ‘trails in the sky’. The top hit is What will you play in the weekend? , which contains four matches of the search term spread across 1,730 posts. But even without the thread title as a clue, a more sophisticated search algorithm could recognize that Excellent classic JRPG on Steam NOW, $16.99 contains a dozen matches in 90 posts, so a much larger percentage of the thread is about the search term topic. But that thread isn’t even in the top 5 results, beaten out by, of all threads, Bethesda finally let the other shoe drop on paid mods at E3 2017, thanks to its several matches of ‘Skyrim’ and none at all of ‘Trails’.