Hi,
Does anyone know of a search engine that handles literal searches correctly?
E.g. one that is able to find the following exact text (part between the quotes): "(*this)[".
I seem to remember that Google supported this in the past, but no more it seems
Searching a search engine
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Re: Searching a search engine
Hallo Jan,Jan Brouwer wrote:Hi,
Does anyone know of a search engine that handles literal searches correctly?
E.g. one that is able to find the following exact text (part between the quotes): "(*this)[".
I seem to remember that Google supported this in the past, but no more it seems
Werkt dit niet zoals je verwacht, "advanced search" als optie, direct achter het zoekvenster?
http://www.google.nl/advanced_search?hl=nl
Verder heb ik nog als zoekmachine ingesteld:
http://scholar.google.nl/
http://www.searchmash.com/
http://www.heelom.com/
Eelco
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first
place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you
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place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you
are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
-- Brian W. Kernighan
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Re: Searching a search engine
These days I doubt you will find one that does that exactly. An order of preference may be......Jan Brouwer wrote:Hi,
Does anyone know of a search engine that handles literal searches correctly?
E.g. one that is able to find the following exact text (part between the quotes): "(*this)[".
I seem to remember that Google supported this in the past, but no more it seems
Literal searches: Yahoo!
Conceptual/abstract searches: Ask
Information searches: Google
E-commerce searches: Yahoo!
Overall best: Google or Ask
There used to be a very good literal search engine called Teoma which now redirects to Ask, but I have no idea if the same indexing technologies are employed by Ask.
Christopher
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Re: Searching a search engine
Prior to this thread I did not realize that literal search means regular expression search. It is far more complex to build a regular expression index than the normal keyword index. I am surprised than any search engine ever supported this before. Seems to be a lot of extra engineering effort and at best only a small % of regular expressions can be supported to maintain the normal quick speed of search results.
Yahoo does not support regular expression search. Neither does the current ask.com site. In a regex search, Kasparo? or Kasparo* should return pages containing "Kasparov" for example.
Yahoo does not support regular expression search. Neither does the current ask.com site. In a regex search, Kasparo? or Kasparo* should return pages containing "Kasparov" for example.
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Re: Searching a search engine
Thanks for all your suggestions.
I did some more examination and discovered the following
- Searches between quotes do match the words in order, however most non-alphanumeric characters are ignored.
- The asterisk in "(*this)[" does indeed work as a kind of regular expression, at least in Google, but that was not my intention.
- There is Google codesearch which does exactly what I am looking for, and which also supports regular expressions, however it only searches source code. Still, nice tool!
Someone should start a literal search clone of Google, "Google"
I did some more examination and discovered the following
- Searches between quotes do match the words in order, however most non-alphanumeric characters are ignored.
- The asterisk in "(*this)[" does indeed work as a kind of regular expression, at least in Google, but that was not my intention.
- There is Google codesearch which does exactly what I am looking for, and which also supports regular expressions, however it only searches source code. Still, nice tool!
Someone should start a literal search clone of Google, "Google"