Ask HN: General purpose search engine that will respect special characters?
4•what-if•2w 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.
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 "!!!"
Thank you for the consideration and time you took to respond nonetheless.
-__-•1w 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/
what-if•1w ago
Thank you for the suggestions. Excluding false positives and the typical hallucinations LLMs exhibit, exa.ai was useful and would often give me what I asked for. Perplexity, not as much. Searx seems interesting; I will certainly toy with it.
eimrine•2w ago
Source: googled that for you.
what-if•2w ago
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.