IT Underwire

What is the fixation with search engines fearing to return empty results?  They seem to think that this isn't user friendly or something.

Make no mistake, it is great to suggest alternatives should the search turn up nothing. That is a favor and can help when typos are made.

But take the example I encountered today on MyFaceInATube. (That's YouTube's alter ego from a show called The Middleman.)

I was searching for videos about a plugin to OpenBVE (a train driving simulation) called BVEC_ATS. I know about the plugin and where to find it. I was hoping to find videos of trains running in OpenBVE with that plugin enabled.

So I searched for the string "bvec_ats". Freakin' MFIAT came back with "Searching instead for bobcats" and returned a long list of videos about bobcats.

What it didn't say was that my search returned no results. It did offer me the chance to search for the exact thing that I asked. Which is what I thought I'd done in the first place!

I'm sorry, guys, replacing my search with something else is the opposite of friendly. It's what I call user hostile. 

In my opinion, the proper way is to show the empty search, in case that is what I wanted, and offer the alternative search in case I had really misspelled "bobcats" so horribly that my typing teacher would retract my "A." (That'll date me. I'd bet real money that high schools don't have typing class anymore.)