5 ms·

Show HN: Recalll – Search Engine for programmers and developers

69 points by parvbhullar 11y ago

parvbhullar 11y ago
This is search engine for developers and programmers, it enables you to search across websites as well as cloud apps. I'm looking for feedback. Thanks
- spotman 11y ago
  Cool efforts so far. I can see the use case for wanting to find information across multiple sites. Couple feedback points. 1 - the ui in your screenshot on the home page (https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png), in the results section you have the title as blue. At least in safari, in real life its black. This makes the results all run together and visually be hard to quickly tell where one result ends and the next begins. 2 - if I was to use it for actual work, the search "nsfetchedresultscontroller duplicates" would be something that I have searched for recently. unfortunately nothing really useful came up on this recalll.co. Maybe a good example to test against google, stack overflow, and quora. 3 - not sure if the types of queries I want to put in to search asana or evernote, would be the same types of queries I would want to search the web / blogs / stack overflow. I suppose maybe the use case is, just use recall, and we'll figure it out. But sometimes I may want to search for something silly like "s3 credentials from bob", which might producer weird results in stack overflow for example, because there is probably lot of people talking about s3 credentials, but its completely out of context, and I would want the results from evernote or something. (whether evernote is a good place to store those of course is probably another discussion, but to illustrate the point) 4 - some people won't install chrome extensions. if I try to search right from your homepage, the animated help thing starts to overwrite my input. whatever I'm searching, if its not already open, I want to open it quickly, and execute the search immediately. Great work though. The concept is cool. Maybe you could end up like duckduckgo, for programmers.
  - parvbhullar 11y ago
    thank man, for your valuable points. For 1 - Ya I also think blue is good for title color. i changed it some time back to black will revert back to blue. 2 - due to lack of data results are not good, crawler is continuously running, once we have enough data, that wont be a problem. 3 - for cloud apps - you hit exactly on the point that's why we added cloud apps, to target specific site or app you can choose app name in query like "s3 credentials from bob evernote", it will do the trick for you until more usable is developed. 4 - Yes chrome extension installation is bit tricky but right now don't have anything more innovative will figure it out. Search form on home page is symbolic, its not actual search. Initial idea is to take user to search page, definitely club both the pages to single one, like most of search engines are doing.
    - spotman 11y ago
      Cool, keep hacking away. Bookmarked.
- mordocai 11y ago
  Found something interesting. If I use it like it is google and search for "execute javascript capybara" I get awful results. If I use it like I am talking to someone and say "How to execute javascript with capybara" the first result gives me exactly what I want.
  - parvbhullar 11y ago
    Reason behind that we give priority to phrase based searches over terms based searching. though we are figuring the way for more relevant searches for any kind of query.
w-m 11y ago
Great project, a usable search engine for programmers would be a fantastic tool to have. Realising that Google still delivers the most relevant results for the things I want to look up quickly I created http://www.stacksnippet.com/ http://www.stacksnippet.com/ last year. It takes the first Google results from your query and displays stack overflow answers inline. Recall seems exciting, I'll be sure to follow it.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  thanks alot, stacksnippet.com is also a good tool.
Mizza 11y ago
Or.. $ pip install howdoi $ howdoi reverse string python > 'hello world'[::-1] > 'dlrow olleh'
sokoloff 11y ago
I love the idea, so I immediately gave it a shot. https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci doesn't give me any useful results. Same query on google gives me exclusively useful results (at least on page 1). I wish you the best for your project, and I'm sharing my use case in the hopes you can continue to improve, not to discourage. Edit: Doh; it's because I can't spell. Two c's and 1 n and I do get some relevant results. Google has the "fix it for me" hidden from me.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  will add query suggestion and "did you mean" functionality for more suggestive queries.
stkni 11y ago
Nice idea, nicely executed. Tiny suggestion: I'd put a little more white space between the search results. I'm finding it hard to distinguish between different results.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  sure.
mijoharas 11y ago
I'm happy to finally find a search engine giving good results for `>=> haskell`[0] as I can never find good information on those symbols and never remember them. One problem, the link to the browser extension seems to be broken [1]. [0] https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjjibiloijimmadljadhcakpi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjj...
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  good to hear that, it answered your query. yes chrome extension link is broken, fix will be available soon.
  - mijoharas 11y ago
    Seems like it's fixed now. Thanks.
  - mijoharas 11y ago
    Seems like it's fixed now. Thanks.
- taylorfausak 11y ago
  For Haskell in particular, you are better off using Hoogle [1] or Hayoo [2]. [1]: https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%3E%3D%3E https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%3E%3D%3E [2]: http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=%3E%3D%3E http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=%3E%3D%3E
  - mijoharas 11y ago
    You're right, Hoogle and Hayoo are pretty great (search for a function by it's type signature!), but I still think it can be helpful to see other sources of information. Good point though.
BaptisteGreve 11y ago
It reminds me of an article from Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html "The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems thinkable to me. Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is at least straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Make it really good for code search, for example. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete? Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good."
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  hahaha man, you made my day :) thanks
59nadir 11y ago
Searching for "racket parallelism" does not really give anything relevant. In this case I searched for something that is extensively written about in the actual Racket documentation, both in the guide and reference material, so I know what I would expect. It's a very natural search to do if you're thinking about parallelism and concurrency (both of which are suggested by Google, for example), but I assume most Racket users use the excellent documentation search for Racket. If you indexed that you'd probably get great results.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  yes due to lack of data results are not relevent, definatally index documentation for racket. good points though. thanks
tempodox 11y ago
Google still finds way better results for “complex gamma function”, for example. I have yet to see a search engine that can take on the Goog, let alone surpass it. I wonder what it would take to accomplish that...
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  What you are saying is ambitious, this is first beta release of product, we do have vision to take on google at least for programmers but it will take time, right people and resources. I hope next release much better than this one in terms of speed, relevancy, technology, search algos and data. though very motivating points. thanks
  - tempodox 11y ago
    I realise it's ambitious, but in the end, if you can't at least (have hopes to) compete with Google, what would be the point in starting a search engine project at all? Roughly, all your prospective users are Google users now. You have my best wishes to succeed.
    - parvbhullar 11y ago
      totally agree with you. as i told you we have vision to acquire users from mainstream search engines, what i'm asking is more time. though thanks a lot for your wishes.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
song0ku 11y ago
Searched for "javascript date", got the date. Didn't know what to expect. "Thu May 28 2015 16:41:46 GMT+0100 (WEST)" "javascript while(1)" also gives interesting results
- eleumik 11y ago
  really interesting
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  there is broken code while searching for particular queries. will fix that. thanks for pointing out.
meesterdude 11y ago
this looks interesting; though i think the design should be more search focused like how google's homepage is; with the searchbar at the top is good for results, but it should be more center for the homepage; like, there's a bunch of other stuff going on there that I don't care about; i'm there to search. It's distracting, really. Otherwise, keep at it! the more diversity we have the better.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  good points, added to TODO.
ohitsdom 11y ago
I was playing with async controllers in .NET last night and was looking up a lot of reference material. Recalll's results were surprisingly great- well done! https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  glad to hear that. thanks
rmason 11y ago
I asked it what is Lucee? I got back some gibberish about JavaScript. The answer is an open source scripting language on the JVM. The first ten replies on Google were correct as was Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee Wondering just when you did your crawl as Lucee has only been around since January?
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  the reason is we didn't crawl wikipedia yet, we are planing to do that very soon.
karn09 11y ago
Pretty neat idea! I think it would be really cool to declare my default languages though, so it only returns results from what I specified.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  good suggestion, added to TODO.
mzjs 11y ago
Great idea, will use. One thing I'd really like to see is cheat sheets. For example, "regex cheatsheet".
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  great suggestion.

69 points by parvbhullar 11y ago

This is search engine for developers and programmers, it enables you to search across websites as well as cloud apps. I'm looking for feedback. Thanks

spotman 11y ago
Cool efforts so far. I can see the use case for wanting to find information across multiple sites. Couple feedback points. 1 - the ui in your screenshot on the home page (https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png), in the results section you have the title as blue. At least in safari, in real life its black. This makes the results all run together and visually be hard to quickly tell where one result ends and the next begins. 2 - if I was to use it for actual work, the search "nsfetchedresultscontroller duplicates" would be something that I have searched for recently. unfortunately nothing really useful came up on this recalll.co. Maybe a good example to test against google, stack overflow, and quora. 3 - not sure if the types of queries I want to put in to search asana or evernote, would be the same types of queries I would want to search the web / blogs / stack overflow. I suppose maybe the use case is, just use recall, and we'll figure it out. But sometimes I may want to search for something silly like "s3 credentials from bob", which might producer weird results in stack overflow for example, because there is probably lot of people talking about s3 credentials, but its completely out of context, and I would want the results from evernote or something. (whether evernote is a good place to store those of course is probably another discussion, but to illustrate the point) 4 - some people won't install chrome extensions. if I try to search right from your homepage, the animated help thing starts to overwrite my input. whatever I'm searching, if its not already open, I want to open it quickly, and execute the search immediately. Great work though. The concept is cool. Maybe you could end up like duckduckgo, for programmers.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  thank man, for your valuable points. For 1 - Ya I also think blue is good for title color. i changed it some time back to black will revert back to blue. 2 - due to lack of data results are not good, crawler is continuously running, once we have enough data, that wont be a problem. 3 - for cloud apps - you hit exactly on the point that's why we added cloud apps, to target specific site or app you can choose app name in query like "s3 credentials from bob evernote", it will do the trick for you until more usable is developed. 4 - Yes chrome extension installation is bit tricky but right now don't have anything more innovative will figure it out. Search form on home page is symbolic, its not actual search. Initial idea is to take user to search page, definitely club both the pages to single one, like most of search engines are doing.
  - spotman 11y ago
    Cool, keep hacking away. Bookmarked.
mordocai 11y ago
Found something interesting. If I use it like it is google and search for "execute javascript capybara" I get awful results. If I use it like I am talking to someone and say "How to execute javascript with capybara" the first result gives me exactly what I want.
- parvbhullar 11y ago
  Reason behind that we give priority to phrase based searches over terms based searching. though we are figuring the way for more relevant searches for any kind of query.

w-m 11y ago

Great project, a usable search engine for programmers would be a fantastic tool to have. Realising that Google still delivers the most relevant results for the things I want to look up quickly I created http://www.stacksnippet.com/ http://www.stacksnippet.com/ last year. It takes the first Google results from your query and displays stack overflow answers inline. Recall seems exciting, I'll be sure to follow it.

parvbhullar 11y ago
thanks alot, stacksnippet.com is also a good tool.

Mizza 11y ago

Or.. $ pip install howdoi $ howdoi reverse string python > 'hello world'[::-1] > 'dlrow olleh'

sokoloff 11y ago

I love the idea, so I immediately gave it a shot. https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci doesn't give me any useful results. Same query on google gives me exclusively useful results (at least on page 1). I wish you the best for your project, and I'm sharing my use case in the hopes you can continue to improve, not to discourage. Edit: Doh; it's because I can't spell. Two c's and 1 n and I do get some relevant results. Google has the "fix it for me" hidden from me.

parvbhullar 11y ago
will add query suggestion and "did you mean" functionality for more suggestive queries.

stkni 11y ago

Nice idea, nicely executed. Tiny suggestion: I'd put a little more white space between the search results. I'm finding it hard to distinguish between different results.

parvbhullar 11y ago
sure.

mijoharas 11y ago

I'm happy to finally find a search engine giving good results for `>=> haskell`[0] as I can never find good information on those symbols and never remember them. One problem, the link to the browser extension seems to be broken [1]. [0] https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjjibiloijimmadljadhcakpi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjj...

parvbhullar 11y ago
good to hear that, it answered your query. yes chrome extension link is broken, fix will be available soon.
- mijoharas 11y ago
  Seems like it's fixed now. Thanks.
- mijoharas 11y ago
  Seems like it's fixed now. Thanks.
taylorfausak 11y ago
For Haskell in particular, you are better off using Hoogle [1] or Hayoo [2]. [1]: https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%3E%3D%3E https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%3E%3D%3E [2]: http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=%3E%3D%3E http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=%3E%3D%3E
- mijoharas 11y ago
  You're right, Hoogle and Hayoo are pretty great (search for a function by it's type signature!), but I still think it can be helpful to see other sources of information. Good point though.

BaptisteGreve 11y ago

It reminds me of an article from Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html "The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems thinkable to me. Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is at least straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Make it really good for code search, for example. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete? Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good."

parvbhullar 11y ago
hahaha man, you made my day :) thanks

59nadir 11y ago

Searching for "racket parallelism" does not really give anything relevant. In this case I searched for something that is extensively written about in the actual Racket documentation, both in the guide and reference material, so I know what I would expect. It's a very natural search to do if you're thinking about parallelism and concurrency (both of which are suggested by Google, for example), but I assume most Racket users use the excellent documentation search for Racket. If you indexed that you'd probably get great results.

parvbhullar 11y ago
yes due to lack of data results are not relevent, definatally index documentation for racket. good points though. thanks

tempodox 11y ago

Google still finds way better results for “complex gamma function”, for example. I have yet to see a search engine that can take on the Goog, let alone surpass it. I wonder what it would take to accomplish that...

parvbhullar 11y ago
What you are saying is ambitious, this is first beta release of product, we do have vision to take on google at least for programmers but it will take time, right people and resources. I hope next release much better than this one in terms of speed, relevancy, technology, search algos and data. though very motivating points. thanks
- tempodox 11y ago
  I realise it's ambitious, but in the end, if you can't at least (have hopes to) compete with Google, what would be the point in starting a search engine project at all? Roughly, all your prospective users are Google users now. You have my best wishes to succeed.
  - parvbhullar 11y ago
    totally agree with you. as i told you we have vision to acquire users from mainstream search engines, what i'm asking is more time. though thanks a lot for your wishes.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

song0ku 11y ago

Searched for "javascript date", got the date. Didn't know what to expect. "Thu May 28 2015 16:41:46 GMT+0100 (WEST)" "javascript while(1)" also gives interesting results

eleumik 11y ago
really interesting
parvbhullar 11y ago
there is broken code while searching for particular queries. will fix that. thanks for pointing out.

meesterdude 11y ago

this looks interesting; though i think the design should be more search focused like how google's homepage is; with the searchbar at the top is good for results, but it should be more center for the homepage; like, there's a bunch of other stuff going on there that I don't care about; i'm there to search. It's distracting, really. Otherwise, keep at it! the more diversity we have the better.

parvbhullar 11y ago
good points, added to TODO.

ohitsdom 11y ago

I was playing with async controllers in .NET last night and was looking up a lot of reference material. Recalll's results were surprisingly great- well done! https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller

parvbhullar 11y ago
glad to hear that. thanks

rmason 11y ago

I asked it what is Lucee? I got back some gibberish about JavaScript. The answer is an open source scripting language on the JVM. The first ten replies on Google were correct as was Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee Wondering just when you did your crawl as Lucee has only been around since January?

parvbhullar 11y ago
the reason is we didn't crawl wikipedia yet, we are planing to do that very soon.

karn09 11y ago

Pretty neat idea! I think it would be really cool to declare my default languages though, so it only returns results from what I specified.

parvbhullar 11y ago
good suggestion, added to TODO.

mzjs 11y ago

Great idea, will use. One thing I'd really like to see is cheat sheets. For example, "regex cheatsheet".

parvbhullar 11y ago
great suggestion.