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Ask HN: General purpose search engine that will respect special characters?

3•what-if•15h ago
I am not a native English speaker, so excuse any errors. I'm looking for a general purpose search engine that will strictly respect queries with special characters (like !, -, +, #, ?) and won't strip them or treat them as operators. I don't want a search engine that only indexes code, like Grep App. I'd sometimes use Symbolhound in the past, but it has been discontinued. Suggest an alternative. Thanks in advance.

Comments

eimrine•14h ago
Qwant, Gibiru and Lilo.

Source: googled that for you.

what-if•12h ago
These search engines don't fullfil my request.

Lilo states that they treat special characters as search operators in their documentation. "Example: recipe +chocolate displays pages containing recipe and chocolate." https://support.lilo.org/docs/utiliser-lilo-au-quotidien/ast...

Although Qwant and Gibiru don't explicitly state anything, they still strip special characters from phrases.

Case 1: Below I search for the nonce word "go9!" and both search engines proceed to ignore the exclamation mark at the end.

Qwant: https://files.catbox.moe/kv776l.png

Gibiru: https://files.catbox.moe/6enerz.png

Case 2: When searching three standalone exclamation marks, I get the "No results found" message on both search engines. What's interesting is that Qwant successfully displays a preview of the Wikipedia article of the band with the name "!!!"

Gibiru: https://files.catbox.moe/4dtzhj.png

Qwant: https://files.catbox.moe/1qetqt.png

Case 3: When searching for the hyphenated phrase "dot-dot", I get results that contain the phrases "Dot Dot" or "Dotdot" or "Dot [wildcard] Dot":

Gibiru: https://files.catbox.moe/mqke9d.png

Qwant: https://files.catbox.moe/ubj8x5.png

Thank you for the consideration and time you took to respond nonetheless.

-__-•10h ago
exa.ai/search and perplexity, and most other search engines if you put the special characters in quotes. you could also find/make an instance of searx or search across aggregators. https://searx.space/

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