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I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly: true? scheme Redirects to a search for "true scheme".

by pluies 15y ago

I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly: true? scheme Redirects to a search for "true scheme". +true? scheme Gives exactly the same results, but tells me that the '+' operator has been deprecated and that I should use quotes. Okay. "true?" scheme Give the same results, i.e. a search for "true scheme". +"true?" scheme Just for good measure, but gives the exact same results too.

T-hawk 15y ago
Most punctuation isn't indexed. A few terms like C++ and C# are special-cased, and a hyphen usually works, but mostly you just can't search for anything punctuation-related for programming. I was recently trying to learn the difference between the <%= and <%# tags in ASP.NET and Google couldn't even understand the query. Not that it's an easy problem. How are the spiders and indexers supposed to distinguish "true?" as a programming lexeme versus just an interrogative sentence that ends with "true"? Sometimes we forget that Google and the other search engines aren't a byte-for-byte search across the entire web. The pages are all tokenized and indexed, with most punctuation dropped since that is indeed the more common usage case. You don't want a search for a word to miss out on pages where the word was glued to quotes or a comma or something.