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A few things: 0) Brave lets me run searches w/out the extension 0:0) Chrome & Chromium do not 0:1) I find it irritating that I am not told to download the ex
by baryphonic 5y ago
A few things:
0) Brave lets me run searches w/out the extension
0:0) Chrome & Chromium do not
0:1) I find it irritating that I am not told to download the extension before the search. This is irritating because I've already expended the mental effort to produce a search query, and something tells me that the extension won't remember that query five minutes later after I've installed it, so I'm going to have to copy-paste or do some other out-of-band nonsense to tack down my current mental context.
0:2) I get the anti-big-tech sentiment. (Hell, I run Brave and set my default engine to DDG.) But I also know how frustrating it is when I have to interrupt some flow of thought I have just to perform some boilerplate ritual for the sake of the computer/developer. Tell me I have to install the extension before I run a search. Convince me that the extension isn't low-quality trash like most browser extensions are, that it's not mining Ethereum in the background and that it's not going to grind my CPU to a halt when I'm running full dev.
1) I wanted to dislike the "for devs" branding, but e.g. `v3d linux registers` actually returned relevant results, including relevant files in the Linux source
2) If you want an "in" for an installed based, make an editor extension, probably VS code; Emacs if you want hacker cred
2:0) This will reduce the friction when I as a dev have to learn some aspect of a library/protocol/RFC/spec on the fly, but only for implementation purposes, not to truly grok.
2:1) An editor extension also frees me from certain limitations of the web (even w/ browser extension). A search engine that could parse and present and even make executable certain portion of the IETF RFCs, for instance, could be quite useful
3) The search results are a little "busy," and I'm not sure what these "shortcut" buttons are for. They seem to do nothing for me (on Brave, no extension).
4) Most code search features are awful. GitHub's search, for instance, has so much noise and so little signal that searching Google or DuckDuckGo w/ site:github.com is more likely to find a relevant result.
4:0) This is particularly frustrating because I often want to search private repos that aren't indexed by Google (hint, hint, editor extension)
4:1) I end up using something like The Silver Searcher (`ag`) on the command line in order to find what I'm looking for, esp. in a large codebase. That UX has all of the warmth and simplicity of a wet blanket.
4:2) If you could build local code search that is integrated into global search results per user, and you convincingly proved that ABSOLUTELY NO private local code left the confines of the computer the data was stored on, then you would have a winner. But you'd need absolute credibility (hint, hint, talk to your lawyers).
4:3) While on the subject of lawyers, this engineer would personally love it if privacy policy and TOS were "versioned" so that I could actually trust them to remain stable over time. Today, TOS is always treated as forced upgrade without my consent.
5) How expensive was the domain `you.com`?