Ask HN: What are search tools that works for the average user?

When it comes to search on internal company documents or any no completely open document, the standard search feature in these days is based on Elastic Search. Most of the search APIs out there are based on Lucene or Solr and, at best, they do synonym matching and edit distance to deal with misspelled words. But they still just look at how many words in the query are matched for the ranking.

These engines work if the user know how to search and who write content knows how to be found. If you look at the searches of a person that was not using the Internet until 6-10 years ago, they are not trained to search on those engines. You would be amazed looking at what they type in a search box.. Unfortunately, Google “delivers” on those queries so they do not have to learn.

And by the way, we all became spoiled by Google a little bit. For example I rarely end up changing my query on Google to find what I want while I used to have to try at least 4 or 5 similar phrases before.

Confluence wiki's I think is based on Lucene and the search is terrible even if you know how to search.

Try to put "tool to fix a clog" in Amazon and contextualwebsearch.com (I think they use Lucene) to laugh out loud. Compare them with Google. Bing does pretty well too on this query.

Is there anything that goes even close? I prefer something opensource but I am open to close source solutions.