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First Impressions: * I won't use a different search engine for programmers stuff vs everything else. So while this might be targeted toward software developers

First Impressions: * I won't use a different search engine for programmers stuff vs everything else. So while this might be targeted toward software developers I can't see myself using it unless it can handle normal searches. * UI/UX - I hate the progress bar, I'm not sure at all what it's telling me as there are results shown while it's still completing. The results are way too spaced out. On my 27" 2K screen I can only see 3 results, the search bar takes up way too much space and there is way too much padding on the results. Don't move the DOM on me, removing the progress bar is jarring as is "Was this answer helpful?" popping in, I'm here for results, not to train your ML. * Trackers - Using the default installs of Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin meant no results ever loaded. I'm not sure what was being blocked that caused the issue but cookies from bing [0] and a request to cloudflareinsights.com [1] should not hamper showing results. Search is a tool and one that I need to be quick, simple, and informationally dense. This checks almost none of those boxes. I'm even open to using a different search engine (I semi-recently switched from Google to Ecosia and it's been near-seamless), but I don't see any "pro" to using this engine and I see a ton of "cons". [0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/V5uiyM https://cs.joshstrange.com/V5uiyM [1] https://cs.joshstrange.com/GkPuap https://cs.joshstrange.com/GkPuap EDIT: I did a few more searches because I realized I wasn't getting the "info box"/ML results on my first few searches and I wanted to be fair. Sorry but that made me dislike this even more. I really, really hate content moving out from under me. My eyes start reading one of the 3 results that was shown then they got pushed down for another overly-padded box that tried to "answer" my question. The results were worse than "grab the selected answer from the first SO that matches this query". Maybe it would be better if that info was shown off to the side and didn't move the results when it loaded in but again, I didn't find it useful in the queries where it showed up. EDIT2: I posted a follow up comment about what, specifically, I think should be changed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005841

_tom_ 4y ago
I definitely see the benefit of a separate code search engine and would use it. Google has, as you have notice, gotten way less useful. A big part of that is trying to target the wider market to the exclusion of less popular searches, like developers'. A dedicated engine would help with that. I'm more than willing to open another tab to not have a search result page full of YouTube videos.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  To each their own. I have 1 flow for search which I don't plan on changing and I personally have no issues with google search (for code, technical, or otherwise). I still consider it to be one of the best and I don't agree with the "google search is getting worse" crowd. Maybe at some point I'll use some kind of "search hydra" that hits multiple engines and either combines the results or shows me the results based on the type of search it thinks I'm doing but I don't imagine I'll ever want to consciously switch engines based on task. Also I've never seen a "search result page full of YouTube videos" no matter what the query was. Sometimes there will be 3 or a carousel of them near the top but I can easily ignore that (assuming they aren't relevant or useful to me). I can't remember the last time I got a video for a code/technical query on google, I just did some testing and only a few queries showed videos, always 3, always partway down the page so that the search results at the top answered what I needed before I even got to the videos.
  - danenania 4y ago
    In your first comment, you say you want high information density. In this one, you say if there are irrelevant results on Google, you'll just ignore them and scroll past. I get that there's always a high bar to switch to a new tool, and Google obviously has certain advantages that are tough to replicate, but it seems like you're applying a bit of a double standard. If Google shows me a bunch of ads and irrelevant results that I have to parse through to find what I'm looking for, that's not high information density; it's quite the opposite.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Both things can be true and you are omitting/ignoring part of my comment about irrelevant results. Higher density of information means I can scan faster and see more with less/no scrolling. As for irrelevant results I called out that the relevant results were above the videos (irrelevant, to me in this context, content). Lastly, I very rarely get ads when doing technical searches so that doesn't really factor in here. I'd wager I get what I want within the first 3-4 results on google reliably (at least when it comes to technical/programming-related searches) and when I don't it's normally super niche (it also rarely has videos or other stuff in the results, think: error messages).
NegativeLatency 4y ago
UI: Feels overpadded to me, I'd like to be able to see more stuff without scrolling so far
8organicbits 4y ago
> * I won't use a different search engine for programmers stuff vs everything else. I'd use this as a ddg bang[1]. I don't use them often, as ddg is a great search engine, but some search engines handle certain queries better and ddg lets you route queries efficiently. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
discreteevent 4y ago
Lowest common denominator and "one click" is killing the internet for me. A lot of times I am the lowest common denominator and so that's fine. But when I am a specialist I want something that lets me be specific and gives me specific results.
- visarga 4y ago
  How much more specific do you need than having the ability to refine your question iteratively? I think regular search engine only allow for a few special keywords. Here you can use natural language to refine.
  - discreteevent 4y ago
    Sorry, I meant this in response to the part of the parent's comment about not wanting a specific search engine for code. To make it clear - I could see myself using this engine.
richardsocher 4y ago
We learned many of these lessons at https://you.com/code https://you.com/code: * we also needed to build a strong "everything else" search engine and then * have great results for coding with specific search apps like StackOverlfow, AI code complete, ++ * be very fast (we messed that up when we first launched) * have great scores on Privacy Badger, be compatible with uBlock, etc. Last week we've started opening up our platform to collaborate on results with outside developers and have gotten a lot of interest: https://about.you.com/developers/ https://about.you.com/developers/ Maybe we can collaborate also with you guys at sayhello. Ping me at hey@you.com if you want to compare notes.
visarga 4y ago
I think you missed the forest for the trees... it is a Q&A system not just a search engine. You can talk to it, you can refine your queries. To the SayHello team: kudos for being faster than Google to release a Q&A+search system. I was expecting something like this for a couple of years wondering why Google was sleeping on its mountain of papers and not doing it. Search was the first step in finding information, Q&A is the next logical step. Language models+search such as DeepMind RETRO have shown this approach to be very efficient: 25x reduction in model size for the same perplexity and verifiable correct answers with source document references. In the future I expect search to become more like an assistant with context and language abilities. Retrieving a bunch of web pages is so 2000's. Q&A is especially relevant for mobile use with speech interface (hello Siri and Google Assistant).
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > I think you missed the forest for the trees... it is a Q&A system not just a search engine. You can talk to it, you can refine your queries. From the creators: > We're building a better search engine for software developers. Also no you can't "talk to it", I'm not sure where you got that idea. It has a "Ask a follow up" but that performs a new search with none of the context of your previous search (also this UI of sliding a modal up from the bottom and layering the results is terrible). > Search was the first step in finding information, Q&A is the next logical step. And we are clearly not there. Not only does this not allow you to ask follow-ups to refine but it doesn't give good results in my testing.
  - rushingcreek 4y ago
    Could you post which examples you tried? It's not perfect, but the "Ask a followup" feature is usually smart enough to use existing context to refine.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      I asked a question with "php" in the search then asked a follow up without including "php" in the search and it gave me python results. Also, and I'm sure this is a code formatting issue, the PHP code is invalid (newlines appear to be missing, the important one being after the opening tag) [0] [0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/RP4B59 https://cs.joshstrange.com/RP4B59
rushingcreek 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback. We agree that speed is incredibly important, and we're working on making searches much faster. We'll be iterating on the UI/UX as well, as we think that we can definitely do better and be more efficient with space. I'd love to hear more about what you mean by "informationally dense" -- some search engines simply show more information on the results page, but that doesn't make results inherently better in my opinion because it frequently simply increases noise relative to signal. Our current approach is to provide only the most relevant answers/code snippets and nothing else (high signal with low noise) as opposed to cramming in every Stack Overflow answer we can find. We realize we still have a long way to go to make it magical for every search, but we're working on it.
- detaro 4y ago
  > some search engines simply show more information on the results page, but that doesn't make results inherently better in my opinion because it frequently simply increases noise relative to signal. But if the "automatic" answer fails and I need to skim results, as I'll often need to do, you put 3 result previews in a space DDG and Google fit 5. They also apply reasonable defaults for the max line length - a basic typography thing that improves quick readability a lot.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Consistent, non-moving (as things load) UI is super important. Also something that bugged me but I didn't realize why until now: don't use the full width for the description under links (or the titles for that matter). We've known for some time now that if you make text too wide it becomes harder to read. My suggestions: * Kill the padding/margins, it's pretty for demos or certain cases but I want to be able to see more information, heavy padding/margins have no place in search results. * Shrink the search bar to the upper left like every other search engine. Keeping it centered with tons of padding wastes space. Take your logo and put it to the left of the search field, take the buttons and put them to the right. On my screen you are burning a little over 500px of vertical space with things that don't matter, the results matter. * Shrink your "regular" search results to be half the width of the screen (on desktop, something like a max of 700, Google uses ~640 as does Ecosia). Use the space to the right to show your AI/ML results. This means no content will jump around and people can more easily read the results, full-width is very hard to read. Also shorten the "description" under the links. 2 lines max (at 640px width). * Either don't ask "Was this answer helpful?" (use hints like: Did they click the link? Did they leave the site after seeing the results?) OR don't make it move the content (hold the space empty if you must animate it in, just don't let the content shift multiple times after doing a search). Here is your default result for "this is a test" search query: https://cs.joshstrange.com/oKbz6G https://cs.joshstrange.com/oKbz6G Here it is with a bunch of padding/margins removed: https://cs.joshstrange.com/VEVXGh https://cs.joshstrange.com/VEVXGh Yes, I removed the logo/buttons because that was faster than moving them to the left/right of the search but the end result is the same. In my tightened up version you can fit 8+ result links where the initial version could only show 3, also all the results are easier to read.
hbn 4y ago
Also the scraped snippet appears at the top of the results a couple seconds after the results load and it causes all the results below it to suddenly jerk lower on the page
wayy 4y ago
To comment on the dynamic DOM - we're displaying up to three answer types (text, code, links) for each question. We're loading them independently to get information to the user as fast as possible. The alternative (in this state) is to have all of them wait until the slowest component finishes. We're still in the early stages of development, so either way it's not going to be perfect. I can see how this can be a poor experience for some - we're working on it.
- visarga 4y ago
  Maybe not everyone understands that the Q&A responses have to go through a large language model before they are displayed. This takes time, showing something while the LM is churning away is a good idea.
  - wayy 4y ago
    Yep, the current loading bar attempts to do that (replaced by the slowest generated answer when available). Definitely looking into new ways to improve speed + loading experience if necessary.
- unsafecast 4y ago
  A placeholder empty box that gets populated when the content arrives would be an improvement.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Side-by-side is the best way to handle this. Show results on the left and load in the ML stuff on the right after it loads. This prevents content-jump and makes the results less wide (you want to aim for <700px to be more readable).
jerrysievert 4y ago
a search for v8 gave me: * juice * v8 engine * juice * v8 engine * juice so definitely some non-programming searches showing up, unfortunately none of the documentation sources for v8.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Yep, I saw non-programming stuff but my worry is, if they are branding themselves as "better search engine for software developers", that programming-stuff will be weighted higher than non-programming stuff even if the search term has nothing to do with programming (or a tenuous link). Though your search examples seem to prove the exact opposite. All that said the UI/UX is too frustrating to use (as-in) even if they don't promote programming content over non.

_tom_ 4y ago

I definitely see the benefit of a separate code search engine and would use it. Google has, as you have notice, gotten way less useful. A big part of that is trying to target the wider market to the exclusion of less popular searches, like developers'. A dedicated engine would help with that. I'm more than willing to open another tab to not have a search result page full of YouTube videos.

joshstrange 4y ago
To each their own. I have 1 flow for search which I don't plan on changing and I personally have no issues with google search (for code, technical, or otherwise). I still consider it to be one of the best and I don't agree with the "google search is getting worse" crowd. Maybe at some point I'll use some kind of "search hydra" that hits multiple engines and either combines the results or shows me the results based on the type of search it thinks I'm doing but I don't imagine I'll ever want to consciously switch engines based on task. Also I've never seen a "search result page full of YouTube videos" no matter what the query was. Sometimes there will be 3 or a carousel of them near the top but I can easily ignore that (assuming they aren't relevant or useful to me). I can't remember the last time I got a video for a code/technical query on google, I just did some testing and only a few queries showed videos, always 3, always partway down the page so that the search results at the top answered what I needed before I even got to the videos.
- danenania 4y ago
  In your first comment, you say you want high information density. In this one, you say if there are irrelevant results on Google, you'll just ignore them and scroll past. I get that there's always a high bar to switch to a new tool, and Google obviously has certain advantages that are tough to replicate, but it seems like you're applying a bit of a double standard. If Google shows me a bunch of ads and irrelevant results that I have to parse through to find what I'm looking for, that's not high information density; it's quite the opposite.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Both things can be true and you are omitting/ignoring part of my comment about irrelevant results. Higher density of information means I can scan faster and see more with less/no scrolling. As for irrelevant results I called out that the relevant results were above the videos (irrelevant, to me in this context, content). Lastly, I very rarely get ads when doing technical searches so that doesn't really factor in here. I'd wager I get what I want within the first 3-4 results on google reliably (at least when it comes to technical/programming-related searches) and when I don't it's normally super niche (it also rarely has videos or other stuff in the results, think: error messages).

NegativeLatency 4y ago

UI: Feels overpadded to me, I'd like to be able to see more stuff without scrolling so far

8organicbits 4y ago

> * I won't use a different search engine for programmers stuff vs everything else. I'd use this as a ddg bang[1]. I don't use them often, as ddg is a great search engine, but some search engines handle certain queries better and ddg lets you route queries efficiently. https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang

discreteevent 4y ago

Lowest common denominator and "one click" is killing the internet for me. A lot of times I am the lowest common denominator and so that's fine. But when I am a specialist I want something that lets me be specific and gives me specific results.

visarga 4y ago
How much more specific do you need than having the ability to refine your question iteratively? I think regular search engine only allow for a few special keywords. Here you can use natural language to refine.
- discreteevent 4y ago
  Sorry, I meant this in response to the part of the parent's comment about not wanting a specific search engine for code. To make it clear - I could see myself using this engine.

richardsocher 4y ago

We learned many of these lessons at https://you.com/code https://you.com/code: * we also needed to build a strong "everything else" search engine and then * have great results for coding with specific search apps like StackOverlfow, AI code complete, ++ * be very fast (we messed that up when we first launched) * have great scores on Privacy Badger, be compatible with uBlock, etc. Last week we've started opening up our platform to collaborate on results with outside developers and have gotten a lot of interest: https://about.you.com/developers/ https://about.you.com/developers/ Maybe we can collaborate also with you guys at sayhello. Ping me at hey@you.com if you want to compare notes.

visarga 4y ago

I think you missed the forest for the trees... it is a Q&A system not just a search engine. You can talk to it, you can refine your queries. To the SayHello team: kudos for being faster than Google to release a Q&A+search system. I was expecting something like this for a couple of years wondering why Google was sleeping on its mountain of papers and not doing it. Search was the first step in finding information, Q&A is the next logical step. Language models+search such as DeepMind RETRO have shown this approach to be very efficient: 25x reduction in model size for the same perplexity and verifiable correct answers with source document references. In the future I expect search to become more like an assistant with context and language abilities. Retrieving a bunch of web pages is so 2000's. Q&A is especially relevant for mobile use with speech interface (hello Siri and Google Assistant).

joshstrange 4y ago
> I think you missed the forest for the trees... it is a Q&A system not just a search engine. You can talk to it, you can refine your queries. From the creators: > We're building a better search engine for software developers. Also no you can't "talk to it", I'm not sure where you got that idea. It has a "Ask a follow up" but that performs a new search with none of the context of your previous search (also this UI of sliding a modal up from the bottom and layering the results is terrible). > Search was the first step in finding information, Q&A is the next logical step. And we are clearly not there. Not only does this not allow you to ask follow-ups to refine but it doesn't give good results in my testing.
- rushingcreek 4y ago
  Could you post which examples you tried? It's not perfect, but the "Ask a followup" feature is usually smart enough to use existing context to refine.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I asked a question with "php" in the search then asked a follow up without including "php" in the search and it gave me python results. Also, and I'm sure this is a code formatting issue, the PHP code is invalid (newlines appear to be missing, the important one being after the opening tag) [0] [0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/RP4B59 https://cs.joshstrange.com/RP4B59

rushingcreek 4y ago

Thanks for the feedback. We agree that speed is incredibly important, and we're working on making searches much faster. We'll be iterating on the UI/UX as well, as we think that we can definitely do better and be more efficient with space. I'd love to hear more about what you mean by "informationally dense" -- some search engines simply show more information on the results page, but that doesn't make results inherently better in my opinion because it frequently simply increases noise relative to signal. Our current approach is to provide only the most relevant answers/code snippets and nothing else (high signal with low noise) as opposed to cramming in every Stack Overflow answer we can find. We realize we still have a long way to go to make it magical for every search, but we're working on it.

detaro 4y ago
> some search engines simply show more information on the results page, but that doesn't make results inherently better in my opinion because it frequently simply increases noise relative to signal. But if the "automatic" answer fails and I need to skim results, as I'll often need to do, you put 3 result previews in a space DDG and Google fit 5. They also apply reasonable defaults for the max line length - a basic typography thing that improves quick readability a lot.
joshstrange 4y ago
Consistent, non-moving (as things load) UI is super important. Also something that bugged me but I didn't realize why until now: don't use the full width for the description under links (or the titles for that matter). We've known for some time now that if you make text too wide it becomes harder to read. My suggestions: * Kill the padding/margins, it's pretty for demos or certain cases but I want to be able to see more information, heavy padding/margins have no place in search results. * Shrink the search bar to the upper left like every other search engine. Keeping it centered with tons of padding wastes space. Take your logo and put it to the left of the search field, take the buttons and put them to the right. On my screen you are burning a little over 500px of vertical space with things that don't matter, the results matter. * Shrink your "regular" search results to be half the width of the screen (on desktop, something like a max of 700, Google uses ~640 as does Ecosia). Use the space to the right to show your AI/ML results. This means no content will jump around and people can more easily read the results, full-width is very hard to read. Also shorten the "description" under the links. 2 lines max (at 640px width). * Either don't ask "Was this answer helpful?" (use hints like: Did they click the link? Did they leave the site after seeing the results?) OR don't make it move the content (hold the space empty if you must animate it in, just don't let the content shift multiple times after doing a search). Here is your default result for "this is a test" search query: https://cs.joshstrange.com/oKbz6G https://cs.joshstrange.com/oKbz6G Here it is with a bunch of padding/margins removed: https://cs.joshstrange.com/VEVXGh https://cs.joshstrange.com/VEVXGh Yes, I removed the logo/buttons because that was faster than moving them to the left/right of the search but the end result is the same. In my tightened up version you can fit 8+ result links where the initial version could only show 3, also all the results are easier to read.

hbn 4y ago

Also the scraped snippet appears at the top of the results a couple seconds after the results load and it causes all the results below it to suddenly jerk lower on the page

wayy 4y ago

To comment on the dynamic DOM - we're displaying up to three answer types (text, code, links) for each question. We're loading them independently to get information to the user as fast as possible. The alternative (in this state) is to have all of them wait until the slowest component finishes. We're still in the early stages of development, so either way it's not going to be perfect. I can see how this can be a poor experience for some - we're working on it.

visarga 4y ago
Maybe not everyone understands that the Q&A responses have to go through a large language model before they are displayed. This takes time, showing something while the LM is churning away is a good idea.
- wayy 4y ago
  Yep, the current loading bar attempts to do that (replaced by the slowest generated answer when available). Definitely looking into new ways to improve speed + loading experience if necessary.
unsafecast 4y ago
A placeholder empty box that gets populated when the content arrives would be an improvement.
joshstrange 4y ago
Side-by-side is the best way to handle this. Show results on the left and load in the ML stuff on the right after it loads. This prevents content-jump and makes the results less wide (you want to aim for <700px to be more readable).

jerrysievert 4y ago

a search for v8 gave me: * juice * v8 engine * juice * v8 engine * juice so definitely some non-programming searches showing up, unfortunately none of the documentation sources for v8.

joshstrange 4y ago
Yep, I saw non-programming stuff but my worry is, if they are branding themselves as "better search engine for software developers", that programming-stuff will be weighted higher than non-programming stuff even if the search term has nothing to do with programming (or a tenuous link). Though your search examples seem to prove the exact opposite. All that said the UI/UX is too frustrating to use (as-in) even if they don't promote programming content over non.