Tuesday, May 22, 2012

SymbolHound - Programmer's search for special characters? - Stack Overflow

google - Search engine for special characters? - Stack Overflow:

[Connie says: I'll show a search I did with symbolhound at the end of this post.  This is a Google-like search, except useful for looking for code constructs.  I have found a few special characters can be successfully escaped and quoted in Google search, but you definitely *cannot* search for      {0,}      for instance.]


Google strips most special characters from the text they index so it's not a good tool for many troubleshooting-related tasks, such as finding out what the variable "$-" is in perl, or searching for error output that is loaded with special characters.
Is there a good way to search for such content on the web?
This question is related to the following question: Looking for special characters in Google
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I'm a Google employee who works on Search and I want to say that you're right, Google and other search engines allow only limited special character searching. Is there a specific example (or two or three!) of a query the delivers unsatisfactory results precisely because the special character is ignored? Thanks! Kelly – Kelly F Jan 14 '11 at 0:55
Yes. When searching for tetration-related discussions I tried to search for x^x and x^x^x, with Rambler search engine this worked, but now it does not because it abandoned its own engine last year and uses Yandex now. Another example was when I was searching for 0^0 to be sure what result is correct for that expression when discovered that Gnome and KDE calculators returned different results (KDE's returned 0 while Gnome's returned 1). I filled a bugreport against KDE and now this is fixed. This would be impossible without Rambler working at the time. – Anixx Apr 18 at 21:54
@KellyF Yes I want to search for the exact phrase "/livereload", WITH the slash. I have queries like this all the time that I simply can't do with Google. – Gerry May 18 at 12:59
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up vote11down voteaccepted
This search engine was made to solve exactly the kind of problem you're having:http://symbolhound.com/
Full disclosure: I am the developer of SymbolHound and just launched it a couple weeks ago.
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http://symbolhound.com/?q=C+variable+initialization+%7B0%2C+%7D&l=&e=&n=mathematica&u=

(I constructed the above search with the mathematica exclusion using the "advanced search" button on symbolhound.)




97 results found for ALL OF: C variable initialization {0, } | NONE OF: mathematica
depending on what the constructors for the variable type are and whether the compiler is following the C++98 standrad or theC++03 standard (this is probably
http://stackoverflow.com/question...zation-how-verbose-do-i-need-to-be
// caveat that the default constructor is used instead of a temporary // then copy construction. // C does not have constructors, ofcourse, and
http://stackoverflow.com/question...c-or-c-syntax-structtype-varname-0
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/04/opengl-es-from-ground-up-part-2-look-at.html I would like to pull out the geometry from the rendering process to keep the code modular but I can't seem to get it to work. I've created a class
http://stackoverflow.com/question...ctive-c-arrays-and-class-variables

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