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Comment by _tom_ | Hacker News Reader

I definitely see the benefit of a separate code search engine and would use it. Google has, as you have notice, gotten way less useful. A big part of that is trying to target the wider market to the exclusion of less popular searches, like developers'. A dedicated engine would help with that.

I'm more than willing to open another tab to not have a search result page full of YouTube videos.

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To each their own. I have 1 flow for search which I don't plan on changing and I personally have no issues with google search (for code, technical, or otherwise). I still consider it to be one of the best and I don't agree with the "google search is getting worse" crowd. Maybe at some point I'll use some kind of "search hydra" that hits multiple engines and either combines the results or shows me the results based on the type of search it thinks I'm doing but I don't imagine I'll ever want to consciously switch engines based on task.

Also I've never seen a "search result page full of YouTube videos" no matter what the query was. Sometimes there will be 3 or a carousel of them near the top but I can easily ignore that (assuming they aren't relevant or useful to me). I can't remember the last time I got a video for a code/technical query on google, I just did some testing and only a few queries showed videos, always 3, always partway down the page so that the search results at the top answered what I needed before I even got to the videos.

In your first comment, you say you want high information density. In this one, you say if there are irrelevant results on Google, you'll just ignore them and scroll past.

I get that there's always a high bar to switch to a new tool, and Google obviously has certain advantages that are tough to replicate, but it seems like you're applying a bit of a double standard. If Google shows me a bunch of ads and irrelevant results that I have to parse through to find what I'm looking for, that's not high information density; it's quite the opposite.

With one dominant search provider, we are constantly conditioned to parse the results from Google. It is very easy to ignore certain parts of the page and mentally process which parts of the page your brain is interested in.

So, while it’s not necessarily “information dense”, finding the information you need is comparatively “cognitively light”. Or at least predictable…

The devil you know…

Fair point, but I think the technical term for that is "Stockholm Syndrome". Or perhaps in this case, we should call it "Mountain View Syndrome".

You're right -- we are all conditioned by Google. Yet, using Hello for my own technical searches these past few weeks, higher signal and lower noise is much better for me personally. At the end of the day, Justin and I are making the search engine that we want to use ourselves as developers.

Both things can be true and you are omitting/ignoring part of my comment about irrelevant results. Higher density of information means I can scan faster and see more with less/no scrolling. As for irrelevant results I called out that the relevant results were above the videos (irrelevant, to me in this context, content). Lastly, I very rarely get ads when doing technical searches so that doesn't really factor in here. I'd wager I get what I want within the first 3-4 results on google reliably (at least when it comes to technical/programming-related searches) and when I don't it's normally super niche (it also rarely has videos or other stuff in the results, think: error messages).

Right, but you still have to click on those links manually and potentially scan lots of text yourself for relevancy. Our goal is to automate that.

I understand that, unfortunately your goal is still in the future (be it a week, month, year, or decade I can't tell you but it's not there today). In the interim (and if you want users while you refine) your search results should at least be on par with Google/Bing/etc. That way the "happy path" is your ML spits out the right answer and no links need to be clicked but if your logic can't come up with an answer or if it comes up with the wrong one you need the results to be a viable fallback.

EDIT: Building on what I said:

I use Github CoPilot and have been very happy with it. It's far from perfect and even when it spits out good code I have to do minor cleanup but it does save me time and "sparks joy" when it works. When it doesn't work it doesn't really get in my way. If CP required I change my entire method of programing, IDE, or if I had to go into a "special mode" to use it then it would be next to worthless to me.

As it stands you don't have a good fallback (regular results). Your product should be additive to what currently exists in the space. Not "a step forward if we guess the correct answer and a massive step backwards if we don't". I 100% believe you can make changes such that the results function as a perfect fallback (I've outlined them in various places of this thread).

Not the parent poster, but I think there is an important distinction between information density and information relevancy. Google is information dense (compared to this), but not all of it is relevant. This search engine aims for higher relevancy, but the density suffers from the stylistic choices of the creators.

This is exactly what we think. And yes, we definitely plan to do better with space efficiency

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