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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Nice! Installed it and will now make it part of all the computers I use.

I found this funny:

> It uses Google and Stackoverflow APIs, because Stackoverflow search on its own doesn't works as well.

It doesn't really make sense why Google would be a better entrance point into StackOverflow's content -- but it is -- as I imagine the Google algorithm uses SO's API itself to incorporate SO's data into pagerank in some way (the tags, the points, etc.)...OTOH, after landing on a particular question via Google, if it isn't the thing I actually need, I find SO's list of related questions to almost always be on point.

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Try Stackexchange search, it never gets you what you are looking for, they are just using some kind of Elastic Search.

I think Google instead indexes SO pages as any html, and does a much better job at figuring out what "unzip .bz2" means.

Google ignores special characters though - that makes it really hard to search for some things.

Not always. Since a year or two, I'm seeing they take into account many special characters:

https://www.google.com/search?q=.

https://www.google.com/search?q=.bz2 and https://www.google.com/search?q=bz2 are different, for instance.

I think google flags accounts as programmers and treats their searches differently. If I'm logged out of Google, searching for programming questions sometimes leads to sites on completely unrelated topics. Whereas when I'm logged into my account, from which 99% of my searches are programming intensive, I get all relevant programming results.

Google does this with all areas of interest. Politics, knitting, cat videos, programming etc. Sometimes it is useful sometimes it will re-enforce an echo chamber effect.

IME, Google's search is better than 99.9% of internal site searches.

Which is weird because a site's designers _know_ which parts of the content are relevant.

I don't think it's weird at all. Google has some of the brightest search minds and years of experience; an site's team is lucky to have someone on staff who even knows what porter-stemming is.

Ok, true. I've personally found that I can kick Google's butt simply because Google cannot trust the site's creator. This puts them at a big disadvantage right out of the gate.

It's not that weird. I know what content is on my site, but fuzzy matching the vast variety of input strings is non-trivial to do well. (Emphasis on 'to do well' because there are a lot of ways to get it working but poorly.)

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