<!-- thumbnail: http://i.imgur.com/Zwjnr.png -->

<a href="http://symbolhound.com/"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/1rXGy.png"></img></a>

## About

See [symbolhound.com][1]

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&nbsp;Overflow search, so I made a search engine for programmers. It currently searches mostly Stack&nbsp;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&nbsp;Exchange users have run into. It is frequently asked about:

> [MSE: Is it possible to search for punctuation/special characters?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32879/is-it-possible-to-search-for-punctuation-special-characters)
>
> [SO: How can I use a search engine to search for special characters?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4685615/how-can-i-use-a-search-engine-to-search-for-special-characters)
>
> [WebApps: How to search the internet for terms with special characters](https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/how-to-search-the-internet-for-terms-with-special-characters)

## Contact

[email protected]

## Code

It uses the open source <a href="http://nutch.apache.org/">Apache Nutch</a> and <a href="http://lucene.apache.org/solr/">Apache Solr</a> 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.


  [1]: http://symbolhound.com/