It seems the word "make" is being treated as a stopword by SO's search facility -- a search for it simply takes me to the search description page, just as a search for "the" does.
This has prevented me from being able to search SO for Windows-y alternatives to the Unix utility make
, which as you probably know is a build tool.
(Bonus recursive twist: Yes, I tried searching Meta to see whether this question had been asked already... :) )
[EDIT] Kevin Montrose has pointed out that "make" is justified as a stopword, but I've since discovered that SO drops it even from exact phrase searches like "alternatives to make". That's clearly undesirable, and it seems that the behaviour is already acknowledged by Jeff in comments on this answer. Not clear what (if anything) he plans to do about it though...