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The thing about search is that it is only useful if it lets you find obscure results. Anyone can find common results; they clog every search engine and suffocat
by ackfoo 8y ago
The thing about search is that it is only useful if it lets you find obscure results. Anyone can find common results; they clog every search engine and suffocate functionality.
For example, if I enter “UDP broadcast” into your search, I find all the usual java and cpp results that I can find anywhere. Ho hum. If I wanted those, I could go use Google or probably just trip over them in my living room.
But I want results in Swift because it is relatively new and obscure. There are only 4 Swift projects on Github that match the term “UDP broadcast” out of 319 total results. I have to do an advanced search on the native Github engine to find them.
I think you might want to start by making your search useful for finding the weird obscure things that people really have to hunt for. Then expand it to everything else while finding a way of not drowning the oddball stuff with the common clay (of the New West).
This is where Google, for example, has gone wrong lately. I almost can’t use it for anything meaningful because any meaningful search (example ‘MacOS gps”) brings back “5 Amazing GPS apps for Mac that you can’t live without!!” and many other links with no actual content.
If you want to make a useful search, you have to return the stuff that is hard to find instead of the easy and useless stuff.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoThis would be great, especially if it made it easy to find specific examples of how to do certain things. When I am trying to figure out how to do something I usually find several examples that are decently close of the core idea, then look at the documentation. It helps understand the documentation better, so if I could search for a list of examples, it would be invaluable. Somewhat related, I put in "std::string" under cpp and it didn't return anything, but "string" returned plenty of instances that included "std::string". Being able to use namespaces would help in finding obscure functions with a name that is common, but has a specific module name to make it unique. Any and all improvements in context awareness would be nice too, but probably more difficult than they would be worth for any short term implementation.
- sp1982 8y agoAgree, currently there is zero intelligence in ranking. I need to improve both coverage and ranking.
- wodenokoto 8y agoYou are overestimating the competition. Just add support for parenthesis and brackets and you've beaten both Google search and GitHub search.