Ask HN: General purpose search engine that will respect special characters?

4 points by what-if ↗ HN
I am not a native English speaker, so excuse any errors. I'm looking for a general purpose search engine that will strictly respect queries with special characters (like !, -, +, #, ?) and won't strip them or treat them as operators. I don't want a search engine that only indexes code, like Grep App. I'd sometimes use Symbolhound in the past, but it has been discontinued. Suggest an alternative. Thanks in advance.

3 comments

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Qwant, Gibiru and Lilo.

Source: googled that for you.

exa.ai/search and perplexity, and most other search engines if you put the special characters in quotes. you could also find/make an instance of searx or search across aggregators. https://searx.space/
Thank you for the suggestions. Excluding false positives and the typical hallucinations LLMs exhibit, exa.ai was useful and would often give me what I asked for. Perplexity, not as much. Searx seems interesting; I will certainly toy with it.