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About

http://symbolhound.com/

SymbolHound is a search engine that doesn't ignore special characters. I was always frustrated that I couldn't search for symbols like >> and && using Google or the custom Stack Overflow search, so I made a search engine for programmers. It currently searches mostly Stack Overflow pages, with plans to eventually index a much wider range of programming websites (including symbols, of course).

This is a problem that I know a lot of other Stack Exchange users have run into. It is frequently asked about:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/32879/is-it-possible-to-search-for-punctuation-special-characters

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4685615/search-engine-for-special-characters

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-search-the-internet-for-terms-with-special-characters

Contact

info@symbolhound.com

Code

It uses the open source Apache Nutch and Apache Solr for crawling, indexing, and searching, with a small PHP backend for processing user queries.

License

Nutch and Solr, which power the backend of SymbolHound, both use the open source Apache license.

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+1 I tried it with some Perl variables (which are impossible to search for with Google, etc.) and I'm pleased to report it worked perfectly. – Nathan Osman♦ Nov 29 '11 at 22:34
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this is really great -- and answers at least a few requests on meta.stackoverflow.com – Jeff Atwood♦ Dec 16 '11 at 19:50
sweet and pretty useful idea, thank you for that. – systempuntoout Jan 2 '12 at 16:22
Oddly enough, this was not at the top of the list when I search stackapps for "symbol search" haha. I think it was like 10th down. – styfle Jan 17 '12 at 0:54
Too bad you can't flag a post "Awesome!" – l0b0 Apr 3 '12 at 14:40
Fantastic work! Just tried several special character "strings" for different languages and all queries where answered topic-related, whereas Google just displayed junk.. o) Searching for "color-stop()" made Symbolhound stall, though! – Robert G. Apr 18 '12 at 23:10

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote

Unfortunately there is a bug:

enter image description here

It seems like some of the results for "©" are not from Stack Overflow at all.

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Use advanced search. – kinokijuf Jan 2 '12 at 20:43
Note: this problem doesn't seem to happen with other symbols (like Perl variables, etc.). – Nathan Osman♦ Jan 2 '12 at 23:17
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Though the site does say it searches multiple sites - "SymbolHound searches a growing index of programming websites", maybe there aren't that many posts with the copyright symbol in them. – ChrisF Jan 2 '12 at 23:20
Like ChrisF said, this isn't a bug: SymbolHound is expanding to index sites other than Stack Overflow (currently most searches will still give you almost entirely SO pages, though). There is an advanced search feature that allows you to limit searches to specific sites, if you only want to see SO pages. – dncrane Jan 6 '12 at 1:49
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I must have missed reading that part :) – Nathan Osman♦ Jan 6 '12 at 3:23

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