So, in the era of increasingly good AI powered tools and general search engines full of SEO spam, last week I started creating something little old school and against the trends.

For now It’s a have-fun-and-find-out project that main aim is to provide good search results for general web development queries with a special focus on independent blog authors.

The thesis is that no SEO spam website is in the index, which will already filter out most annoying noise on Google/Bing.

Search results are grouped per type: docs, blogs and magazines (e.g. blog platforms or bigger websites).

For now it’s far from being done in terms of having a full index, but in most cases it already replaces my go-to search engine when I’m looking up some stuff during work.

I’m looking forward hearing out what y’all think and if you think it makes sense overall I can only encourage you to post some links to blogs or docs that are still missing in the index. I’m more than happy to add it to the crawler.

Responds like: “nei, total shit, who would need that” also accepted but constructive critique more appreciated ;)

EDIT: everyone many thanks for all your voices and comments. I’m super grateful for all of them and happy that we have such place like Lemmy!

  • nezbyte@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There was a programming search engine called Symbol Hound that allowed for searching for special symbols like << and &&. It was my fallback search engine while programming if I couldn’t find something on the first page of Google. Sadly, that site appears to have disappeared. Does this search engine have optional support for special characters?

    • sznowicki@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      If it has it’s totally accidental.

      What’s the use case for searching for those kind of symbols? I’ll check if I can tune it for this.

      • towerful@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        When you want to know the name of the operator for a language.
        Like “what does & mean in c++?”.
        &amp; isn’t too bad, but some of them can be difficult (like “JavaScript ??”).
        And if you don’t know it’s called a reference operator, or a bullish coalescence operator, or whatever… Trying to learn what it does can be downright impossible

            • themusicman@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              What? The previous comment said it’s “downright impossible to learn” which is nonsense.

              || means “Evaluate and use the left operand, unless it’s falsy, in which case evaluate and use the right operand instead”

              ?? means “Evaluate and use the left operand, unless it’s nullish, in which case evaluate and use the right operand instead”

              They’re the same thing except for which values fall through to the second operand