8 ms·

The biggest thing I miss from most search engines is first-class support for special characters. I usually resort to spelling out the symbols I’m looking for (

The biggest thing I miss from most search engines is first-class support for special characters. I usually resort to spelling out the symbols I’m looking for (“shebang bin env versus bin bash”) but often people who ask questions or post issues on GitHub use the actual symbols, not the words. I’ve tried a couple of symbol-specific search engines (e.g. https://symbolhound.com https://symbolhound.com) but found it pretty hit-or-miss. I really wish Google/DuckDuckGo had better symbol support natively.

techbio 6y ago
Apparently, like DuckDuckGo, this is based on Bing results and suffers from the same general-web content indexing tradeoffs.
- metrokoi 6y ago
  I was trying to research what types of tests are used to determine hormone levels yesterday, but of course all the results are health sites about how to get a hormone test or when you might need one. It takes several search refinements to get any information that you are looking for. All search engines suffer from an over abundance of information, so much so that it's becoming more and more difficult to find useful information. You really have to know quite a bit about the field you are researching and what terms to use, but of course by that time you probably don't need to search for it. I want a type of search engine that is predictive and can filter out results based on your search history (for example filter out surface level health information sites if I almost never click on them).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Yeah, health is the worst. So is anything related to parenting. In general, any topic that's relevant to the majority of people on the planet is totally swamped in content marketing garbage. This makes me wonder how much a benefit the Internet really is for people, information-wise. These general audience articles I see polluting top search results tend to be at best non-informative, at worst spreading total bullshit, and they're also designed to maximize the time you're spending reading them.
    - metrokoi 6y ago
      Exactly, and it's a compounding problem. The sites with the best information don't win, it's the sites with content optimized to get clicks. It's a problem that gets worse with time and more "real" information gets crowded out. If there's already a good paper or article on what types of tests are used to determine hormone levels I'm not going to make another one, even if it was difficult to find. There are no such barriers stopping health blogs from creating dozens of "why you need a testosterone test today!" articles, however.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > There are no such barriers stopping health blogs from creating dozens of "why you need a testosterone test today!" articles, however. What's even worse, there's good business in manufacturing (often copy-pasting and lightly paraphrasing) such bullshit articles. It's actually an entire profession at this point, called "content marketing".
  - techbio 6y ago
    I like the idea of a search history filter for results, maybe locally as a Bayesian classifier based on a browser history, that I can edit, manually score, and that learns as my interests change. Custom search engine with arbitrary regex scripting would be worth a few bucks a month to almost any coder.
    - maddyboo 6y ago
      A good regular expression search engine would be a superpower.
      - pdimitar 6y ago
        What is that? I'm not familiar with the term.
        maddyboo 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
        pdimitar 6y ago
        Oh, I know what a regex is. But got confused about what wolf a regex search engine look like. I think I understand the idea, just wanted a clarification to make sure.
TechBro8615 6y ago
This hasn’t been a practical problem for me. I find that quoting my query almost always works for finding exact matches of strings, including those that include symbols.
- techbio 6y ago
  May depend on your variation of 'practical', but I have had the opposite experience, and as trivial examples, "+-/" came up with nothing in: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22%2B-*%2F%22 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22%2B-... Likewise no results for "+" "-" "" "/": https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%22+%22-%22+%22*%22+%22%2F%22&oq=%22%2B%22+%22-%22+%22*%22+%22%2F%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%22+%22-%22+%22*%22+%2... Edit: tried to escape the multiplication symbol/asterisk, but I think the italics speak loud enough on this issue
  - TechBro8615 6y ago
    What do you expect for those results though? I think a better example is searching "+= operator python", for which it successfully highlights the "+=" and finds relevant results: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%3D%22+operator+python&oq=%22%2B%3D%22+operator+python&aqs=chrome..69i57.3531j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%3D%22+operator+python...
    - techbio 6y ago
      You get arguably better results (though mostly the same) if you leave out the '+=': https://www.google.com/search?q=operator+python https://www.google.com/search?q=operator+python Edit: Let me walk that back a little. The highlighting may be helpful in some cases and it follows that the operator search is better than I'd noticed in the past. Still an indexing and security nightmare to have loose user-def'd punctuation running over data. Go Big-G, doing what's hard.

techbio 6y ago

Apparently, like DuckDuckGo, this is based on Bing results and suffers from the same general-web content indexing tradeoffs.

metrokoi 6y ago
I was trying to research what types of tests are used to determine hormone levels yesterday, but of course all the results are health sites about how to get a hormone test or when you might need one. It takes several search refinements to get any information that you are looking for. All search engines suffer from an over abundance of information, so much so that it's becoming more and more difficult to find useful information. You really have to know quite a bit about the field you are researching and what terms to use, but of course by that time you probably don't need to search for it. I want a type of search engine that is predictive and can filter out results based on your search history (for example filter out surface level health information sites if I almost never click on them).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Yeah, health is the worst. So is anything related to parenting. In general, any topic that's relevant to the majority of people on the planet is totally swamped in content marketing garbage. This makes me wonder how much a benefit the Internet really is for people, information-wise. These general audience articles I see polluting top search results tend to be at best non-informative, at worst spreading total bullshit, and they're also designed to maximize the time you're spending reading them.
  - metrokoi 6y ago
    Exactly, and it's a compounding problem. The sites with the best information don't win, it's the sites with content optimized to get clicks. It's a problem that gets worse with time and more "real" information gets crowded out. If there's already a good paper or article on what types of tests are used to determine hormone levels I'm not going to make another one, even if it was difficult to find. There are no such barriers stopping health blogs from creating dozens of "why you need a testosterone test today!" articles, however.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > There are no such barriers stopping health blogs from creating dozens of "why you need a testosterone test today!" articles, however. What's even worse, there's good business in manufacturing (often copy-pasting and lightly paraphrasing) such bullshit articles. It's actually an entire profession at this point, called "content marketing".
- techbio 6y ago
  I like the idea of a search history filter for results, maybe locally as a Bayesian classifier based on a browser history, that I can edit, manually score, and that learns as my interests change. Custom search engine with arbitrary regex scripting would be worth a few bucks a month to almost any coder.
  - maddyboo 6y ago
    A good regular expression search engine would be a superpower.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      What is that? I'm not familiar with the term.
      - maddyboo 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
        pdimitar 6y ago
        Oh, I know what a regex is. But got confused about what wolf a regex search engine look like. I think I understand the idea, just wanted a clarification to make sure.

TechBro8615 6y ago

This hasn’t been a practical problem for me. I find that quoting my query almost always works for finding exact matches of strings, including those that include symbols.

techbio 6y ago
May depend on your variation of 'practical', but I have had the opposite experience, and as trivial examples, "+-/" came up with nothing in: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22%2B-*%2F%22 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=%22%2B-... Likewise no results for "+" "-" "" "/": https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%22+%22-%22+%22*%22+%22%2F%22&oq=%22%2B%22+%22-%22+%22*%22+%22%2F%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%22+%22-%22+%22*%22+%2... Edit: tried to escape the multiplication symbol/asterisk, but I think the italics speak loud enough on this issue
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  What do you expect for those results though? I think a better example is searching "+= operator python", for which it successfully highlights the "+=" and finds relevant results: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%3D%22+operator+python&oq=%22%2B%3D%22+operator+python&aqs=chrome..69i57.3531j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%2B%3D%22+operator+python...
  - techbio 6y ago
    You get arguably better results (though mostly the same) if you leave out the '+=': https://www.google.com/search?q=operator+python https://www.google.com/search?q=operator+python Edit: Let me walk that back a little. The highlighting may be helpful in some cases and it follows that the operator search is better than I'd noticed in the past. Still an indexing and security nightmare to have loose user-def'd punctuation running over data. Go Big-G, doing what's hard.