So… I got to 切れる review and knew it was something with cutting but when I put “to cut” it was obviously wrong. I wanted to search for “to cut” (https://www.wanikani.com/search?query=to+cut&button=) and to my surprise - it didn’t return “to be cut” in the resuts.
It would be VERY convenient to have all the variants included. Especially that the results includes some vocab that’s not exactly “to cut” (probably alternative meanings):
I think this has to do with how the search logic was implemented. Just like you mentioned, I think they might just be doing a word for word search as opposed to a more sophisticated search. I would expect a search for “to cut” to return results that contain those two words (“to be cut”, “to cut”). I’d like to suggest a full-text search be implemented if they are not already doing that. If they are doing that then the implementation logic might be buggy.
They definitely have some sort of hidden synonyms or logic though. Searching for “to laugh” will include this result: “吹き出す” which has listed in alternative meanings “To Burst Out Laughing”.
This would not be matched with a simple string comparison though for the same reason “To Be Cut” wouldn’t match a search for “to cut”
