Every site has a different right answer to one question: when someone searches four words and a page matches three of them, should that page appear?
For a parts supplier, no. If the visitor typed a part number and two qualifiers, a page missing one of them is the wrong part, and showing it is worse than showing nothing.
For a content site, yes. Someone searching "best way to prune apple trees in winter" will be well served by a page about pruning apple trees, and demanding all six words finds nothing at all.
Fetchie gives you the dial rather than guessing.
The three modes
Exact. A page must contain every meaningful term in the query. Precise, unforgiving, and right for catalogues where the terms are specific and a near-match is a wrong answer.
Balanced. The default. A page needs to match enough of the query to be plausibly relevant, and pages matching more of it rank higher. This suits most sites, which is why it is the starting point.
Broad. Any meaningful term will bring a page in, with ranking doing the sorting. Nobody ends up with an empty results page. Good for sites where the content is varied and visitors phrase things loosely.
Changing it
It is a radio button on Fetchie’s settings tab. The change applies to the next search. There is no reindex, because strictness is applied when the query runs, not when the content is stored.
That makes it genuinely worth experimenting with. Set it to Exact, search a few things the way your customers do, and see whether the results tighten up usefully or dry up entirely. Switch it back in five seconds if not.
How to choose
The honest way to pick is to look at what your visitors are already searching for and how often they find nothing. Fetchie logs both.
A high rate of empty results usually means you are too strict, or you are missing content people expect you to have. Plenty of results but visitors not clicking usually means you are too broad and the good answers are buried.