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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting on being able to search for punctuation. Being able to search for "$. ruby" or "$_ perl" or "$: << '.' ruby" would be super handy.

edit: Just realized "$_ perl" actually does work. It would be nice, however, if we could search for these kinds of terms generally and not just in specific case.

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I launched a search engine that does exactly this just over a week ago, you can see it here: http://symbolhound.com/

I freaked out when I saw this headline and thought it meant google had finally decided to implement this feature a week after my launch.

That's freaking fantastic. Shame it didn't get much notice on proggit. I'll resubmit it at a busier time and share it on G+ and whatnot. You might want to submit it here yourself, so you can answer any questions people might have and let the community get to know you. Try submitting it with the "Show HN:" heading. Send me an email (in my profile) when you do submit it and I'll be sure to swing by and give it one of the critical first upvotes.

Really cool tool; thanks for that.

Thanks! I do plan to post it on HN, I just want to wait until it's a bit better (right now stackoverflow dominates the results, so I need to adjust the ranking system and index more sites).

BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.

>BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.

Sorry about that. I would have thought putting it in the email field would have made it visible. I've put it in the about field now.

Great! Nice, simple and easy. It can even search for negative numbers without interpreting the - as "exclude". A literal search engine, without Google's well-meaning "intelligence" can be useful in many cases.

1000 times this. I have been waiting a decade to be able to search for '1/2' or '6' 3"' or '£3.50' (not necessarily numbers, you get the point i'm sure), and i was dissapointed to find this post wasn't announcing that.

This. Half my kingdom for this feature.

One of the biggest problems I have with Google search at the moment is when I need to look up specific functions or symbol names. If I'm looking for documentation on g_find_str, the LAST thing I need is to see results that contain "... are going. Find string is a ..."

That's great, Google does n-grams/symbol search finally. Tho 'f# "|>" ' is way less common than "$_ perl", doesn't work yet.

And i think the folks that did, e.g. hoogle took some time to get it right for 1 language

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

http://scalex.org/

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