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Comment by daten | Hacker News Reader

Does it feel like google is moving further away from this with time?

It's common that I get search results that don't contain the keywords I searched for. The results will also contain the keywords but in different parts of the page, so short phrases like hacker news will match pages with "hacker" in the first paragraph and "news" somewhere else on the page. Google used to recognize a hyphen as meaning "only return results where these two words are joined by a space or puncuation", now it ignores the hyphen and you have to enclose the phrase in quotes to get that behavior.

Even more interesting than a simple full-text search would be a regular-expression full-text search of the internet.

In either case, I'm happy to hear IndexTank is trying to fix this.

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That's what the undocumented (as far as I know) AROUND word in searches is for.

If you type "cat AROUND(5) dog" into google, it'll return the top results that contain anywhere from 0 to 5 words between cat and dog.

I vaguely recall that there used to be a feature (and possibly this was with Altavista before I switched to Google) that allowed you to search for words that were close together. So instead of trying ten different permutations of "like jb hifi in London" I would enter the keywords, and various forms "jb hifi type stores in London", "jb hifi stores in central London" etc would be returned. Or am I dreaming?

The wildcard operator – * – is close to what you want:

http://www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html

UPDATE: and someone just posted about the AROUND() operator, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983930

Brilliant - you have my * gratitude.

> Even more interesting than a simple full-text search would be a regular-expression full-text search of the internet

It would seem to me that indexing data in such a way as to support arbitrary regex would be difficult. Anybody know of an existing system?

Yes, Google code search: http://codesearch.google.com

It's my understanding that the amount of code is so small that they just have it all in ram (and maybe less accessed data goes to disk) and do a distributed grep.

Right, that's more or less what all the approaches I've seen use. It's not indexing in the sense of full-text indexing for fast retrieval, all of the data is more or less greped over. It's basically just a full-text search, not an index.

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