Thanks for the feedback, Faujidoc has already responded well.
But just some tips. One of the things our current search does it it tends to work by adding words, so “mahanidana sutta” is guaranteed to return lots of false positives.
“mahanidana” gives two results, one of which is to the correct sutta. “mahanidanasutta” also gives two results, one of which is correct. So that’s not too bad.
You’ll get better results if you just enter the sutta id “dn15”.
The goal of search should be to return relevant results no matter what the exact form of the input. But that is a hard problem. We get so used to searching on Google that we forget, it was by solving this (actually a vast number of very hard problems) that they became one of the most powerful companies in history.
So the way I see it, if Google sometimes does a better job than we do, that is to be expected.
BTW our search is elasticsearch.