Searching a search engine

[Jan Brouwer]

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

[Eelco de Groot]

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

Hallo Jan,

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

[Christopher Conkie]

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

These days I doubt you will find one that does that exactly. An order of preference may be......

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

[shiv]

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.

[Jan Brouwer]

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"