3 ms·
Ask HN: Good Programming Search Engines?
Does anyone have any recommendations regarding a good search engine specifically for programming topics? Ideally one which returns discussions or blog posts, rather than source code, explaining concepts, terms, and potentially discussions programmers have online. All non-programming results would be filtered out.
For example, Google "register" or "auto". These are C Storage Class Specifiers, but nothing relevant to C appears in the first 10 results. They're buried under lots of unrelated content. You can slap "+C" and "-C++" to get more specific, but you can quickly amass a very bloated query string. Copying/pasting programming terms out of a PDF for a quick search becomes cumbersome in some cases too. Google/Bing don't appear to have a filter to blot out all non-programming results.
There are plenty of source code search engines out there:
www.google.com/codesearch
www.koders.com
www.github.com
www.bitbucket.com
...and some community forums which do have great content:
www.stackoverflow.com
www.experts-exchange.com
...but no single centralized "Google for Programming". What search engine(s) do you recommend for programming topics? Do you have any search tips/hints to offer others?
- weaksauce 16y agoHave you tried duckduckgo?
- maxklein 16y agoI have been wanting this for a while too. Google used to be like that back in early 2000s - tech stuff dominated the rankng. Now it's very mainstream stuff.
- srean 16y agoYou may give http://www.plre.org/ http://www.plre.org/ or http://www.cdiggins.com/search/ http://www.cdiggins.com/search/ a try to see if it helps. From the second link: "(PLRE.org) is a custom search engine created using the Google co-op service. The PLRE is designed primarily for researchers, students, language designers, and language implementers who need reputable sources for advanced or esoteric information pertaining to programming languages. This site has a heavy emphasis on advanced topics in programming language theory, but can be useful to find languages with particular features."
- DannyPhillips 16y agoThis could be a good start up idea?
- dgallagher 16y agoPossibly (you never know). Actually if you take the idea a bit further, you could create "custom" search engines for various other topics. For example, a search engine for chef's looking for new food to cook. A search engine for auto-repair for do-it-yourselfers. And of course a programming one. Basically, any major topic or profession. This could be done by taking a large engine (such as Google) and customizing its queries, filtering out non-relevant stuff. Because currently everything is bunched up together in one giant index. It's not as efficient as it could be.