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

9 points by dncrane 14y ago ↗ HN

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.

7 comments

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dncrane 14y ago ↗

Clickable: http://symbolhound.com/

redthrowaway 14y ago ↗

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.

chromatic 14y ago ↗

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

redthrowaway 14y ago ↗

Thanks, I'll check it out.

dncrane 14y ago ↗

Thanks!

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

md1515 14y ago ↗

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.

dncrane 14y ago ↗

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.