I’d say an ideal search engine should be as “dumb” as possible in order for it to be as user driven as possible, it’s not an “AI assistant” of course so it shouldn’t even guess that you’re searching for a song by parsing the phrase you sent it, all it should be doing is pulling up all the pages that contain the words you search for and ranking them in some way. (It’s like how you wouldn’t want a calculator to try to figure out what you’re trying to calculate to give you the answer it “thinks” you want.) You’re right it’s the ranking that’s the problem, what’s missing is that ideally there should also be advanced customisation for the user to control how pages are ranked or it should at least be transparent to the user; Kagi offers a limited version of this but from where we were 25 years ago I would have hoped it would be a lot more advanced by now (and we have Google to thank for that).

I completely agree, ideally I want my search engine to return pages containing exactly the words I searched for in exactly the way I typed them.

Though just to note, the words “gurls” and “girls” are both contained in the body of the text of the first result so I would say maybe it’s not guessing but picking up on that.