We built the best search engine for coders – Introducing YouCode | Hacker News Reader

We built the best search engine for coders – Introducing YouCode

blog.you.com

62 pointsandromaton12 comments

PG was right about the idea of a search engine for coders. But this comes up short. I wonder how old your crawl might be? I did a search and came up with links to an old open source project which hasn't been active for 7-8 years and the source isn't even on GitHub anymore.

I'd encourage you to keep trying. The key is to curate the results with people using that language every day. When they keep a tab open to it all day then start promoting it to people using that language. If you could crawl all the language groups on Slack and include those in the results it would be awesome.

Thanks. Yes, he's been an inspiration.

Do you have some examples of the language groups on Slack you're thinking about?

If you give us the queries you've tried, we will work on improving them also.

We did crawl all of github to provide github issues but probably need more signals maybe stars/forks/most recent commit dates to rank them better... Thanks for pointing that out :)

Tried couple queries that I've used lately for the job and results were meh, seems that getPayload was tokenized into get and Payload and that resulted into much not related stuff from sites that have nothing to do with programming. In code search in my opinion there needs to be subtle distinction when to do exact match, when not, even to keep syntax symbols, so that I could search for call usage, call usage with specific generic parameter, not definition, etc.

Thanks. You're right, we gotta improve the tokenization and work better with special characters. Hoping to ship that end of next week.

First I've heard of you.com...that domain must have cost a pretty penny.

some things money can't buy. the domain had not been for sale for 20years.

I use you.com. Best of the few I've tried. Can you please align the cards to be in the same row ? If you look up "access database spring" you'll see what I mean, 2 large empty rows with one result each that should be combined.

Any chance of business detail cards like google has (hours, map, address, reviews)?

So happy to hear. Yes. I agree with you. The current design needs to be improved. Next week we're releasing a big update to make the right side more aligned more often.

Yes, I think the yelp app will get some of those updates... We'll increase the priority in the backlog :)

I’d simplify the landing page and remove the annoying popups to sign in.

We are all sick of google and the last thing I want to do is sign in to another search engine.

When I search for anything at the search page on my phone (se 2020, up to date) and start scrolling down, it jumps back to ~top very annoyingly after a while, and does so twice or even three times.

here's the "Show HN" from a little while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29165601 (clicking on https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=you.com will give you(!) the others, but that Show HN seemed to be the most populated)

Hi,

Thanks for posting. Richard here from you.com.

One piece of feedback we're working on right now is better tokenization.

We’d love your feedback for a few use cases that we have in mind so far, here are example queries: * searching through StackOverflow for quick code snippets: reverting a git commit for example [1]

* searching through GitHub Issues: when you’re getting an error message that looks unfamiliar [2, 3]

* searching through the documentation for quick reference: PyTorch [4], HuggingFace [5], Docker, PyPi, AWS, MDN, and several others

* searching for walkthroughs, tutorials, tips, and quick intros to a new subject: Medium [6], Tutorials Point, Geeks for Geeks, and others as well

* searching for utilities: code completion (from a large language model that writes code) [7], JSON validator/formatter [8]

* searching for relevant discussions and projects: HackerNews [9], ArXiv [10], Github Repos [11]

* changing preferences in the account dropdown menu so that you can influence which sources you get answers from

* doing all of this from VS Code: we made an extension to make that easier [12]

YouCode is still a work in progress — we’re adding new apps each week and improving the search results. Where do Google or other search engines leave you wanting more when it comes to coding searches? Which sources do you go to when you can’t get what you need from Google and others? What other utilities and use cases would you like to see? How else can we make this better?

If you find something that we can improve, apps that you’d want to see, or a search query didn’t give you a good result, please let us know! We’re here to answer any questions!

[1] https://code.you.com/search?q=revert+a+git+commit

[2] https://code.you.com/search?q=MLflowCallback+to+log+run_name...

[3] https://code.you.com/search?q=onnxruntime+segfault

[4] https://code.you.com/search?q=pytorch+isnan

[5] https://code.you.com/search?q=huggingface+transformers

[6] https://code.you.com/search?q=git+rebase+interactive

[7] https://you.com/search?q=%23+this+function+sorts+a+list+in+a...

[8] https://code.you.com/search?q=json+validator

[9] https://code.you.com/search?q=show+hn

[10] https://code.you.com/search?q=attention+is+all+you+need

[11] https://code.you.com/search?q=pytorch+examples

[12] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=youdotco...

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