Shown HN: A search engine that doesn't ignore special characters, SymbolHound

9 pointsby dncrane15 lat temu7 comments

It's a search engine for programmers where you can search for queries with symbols in them(e.g. if you search for "&&" it will actually return pages with "&&" somewhere in them, unlike google)

See it here: http://symbolhound.com/

There's still a lot of work to be done (especially in indexing more websites, right now everything besides stackoverflow is very underrepresented, but I plan to fix that over the next few months), but it's already been useful to me.

3 comments

redthrowaway15 lat temu

Really cool service. A search engine that doesn't ignore punctuation has been on the wishlist of just about every programmer I know for ages. I'm surprised no one's done it sooner.

Given that the remainder of my week will be spent with perl and shell scripting, neither of which have I used before, I suspect you'll be getting quite a few visits from me.

chromatic15 lat temu

If you're already somewhat familiar with programming, my book Modern Perl has free electronic versions available:

http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html

redthrowaway15 lat temu

Thanks, I'll check it out.

dncrane15 lat temu

Thanks!

Please email me if you can't find something you search for so I can try to improve SymbolHound's search results!

dncrane15 lat temu

Clickable: http://symbolhound.com/

md151515 lat temu

That is a cool idea. I would suggest not including advertisements just yet because they are generic and probably the least appealing of all ads (besides pop-ups). Just a suggestion, though the service itself is cool.

dncrane15 lat temu

Thanks.

The adbrite signup had me list a bunch of keywords, so I figured the ads would be somewhat relevant, but you're right, they do seem generic and unrelated. Maybe that's because of the low amount of traffic so far.

I've removed them for the time being.