http://www.symbolhound.com/ is a search engine for programmers: it doesn’t ignore special characters, so you can search for things like $foo and a^b
Has anyone been using this for their daily programming searches? Would be interesting to hear!
I hadn’t heard of it, poes, but it looks interesting. I’ll do some comparisons between this, Google and DuckDuckGo. (I’m still having trouble weaning myself off Google, as it’s so reliable and familiar.)
I didn’t even know it existed. You’re always full on interesting stuff and this one looks quite promising… do you use it often or is it a recent finding?
A Perl programmer I follow on twitter twotted it.
I tried it earlier today cause I’m doing some Python courses online and searched first DuckDuckGo for raw_input() function… the zero-click info was the python2x docs for built-in functions, and the rest were stackoverflow questions and blogs mentioning it.
SymbolHound gave me all stackoverflow stuff: http://symbolhound.com/?q=raw_input()
I would assume it would be harder to search for Python3’s function since they named it more generically “input()”. Though there is of course an Advanced Search to help with that.
Hi
After pointing sybolhound.com out, I gave it a try on some of the terms that I typically have problems with contanimation using google, yahoo, or bing and found it worked really well. Thank you for this!
Steve
Off Topic:
Do you mind my asking why you are weaning yourself off Google?
[ot]Many of us are weaning ourselves off google. Reliance on a single entity for everything has all the same dangers of a monoculture. The filter bubble, the tracking, and the heavy reliance for everything (for some people) from mail to calendars to company discussions to coding to how-to-spell-that-word on a single company who is vested in the United States (and thus subject to the increasingly not-sane regulations and laws of the US) scares the hell out of us.
Me, I’ve set DuckDuckGo for all my default address-bar searches, and since it misses plenty of Dutch, I search for Dutch things (and whatever else DDG misses) using !gnl before my search terms. Best of both worlds : )[/ot]
Off Topic:
Thanks @Stomme poes! Are there the same concerns for Yahoo (my default)? Also, and unfortunatley it seems that google narrows and finds what I am looking for better than Bing, Yahoo or any other smaller search engine - that is difficult to wean 
I’m Tom, the co-founder of SymbolHound, the Special Character Search Engine for Programmers.
You’re right, you will find that right now the query results are heavy on StackOverflow, but this is changing as we index more and more programming related websites. If you have a suggestion for a site that you would like to see indexed, or any feedback at all feel free to contact us! Our contact information can be found at: http://www.symbolhound.com .
We hope it’s a useful tool!
-Tom
Hi Tom,
you guys keep up the good work! And spread the word to programmers! DDG is okay with symbols, sometimes ignoring them and sometimes not, but Google is worthless for symbols.
I suppose you could expand to punctuation marks and unicode lookups, would be neat.
That would be neat indeed 
As a matter of fact, we already support all unicode characters, including punctuation marks!
http://www.symbolhound.com
By “unicode lookups” I meant things like maps and those lists of HTML decimal/numerical entities you find scattered around the web… I mean, I keep those bookmarked.
Like if I want to type a weird symbol on this computer, it runs Gnome, so I keep this page bookmarked: http://doc.infosnel.nl/utf-8_symbols.html
Or say I paste → into the search, I can find its name (rarr), its description (rightwards arrow) and hex codes etc (U+2192 (8594)). Right now I use a wikipedia page to look those up.
Also, you guys thinking of hooking up a trade/service with DuckDuckGo? Also I may ask DDG if they’ll add a !sh or !symbol to get results with punctuation from Symbolhound since lots of programmers use DDG.
Ah, understood. You asked, you got it! We’ll try to add that feature in the next one to two weeks.
In addition, we now have a source code search option, much like the Google Code Search that was officially discontinued on Sunday.
We haven’t yet, but it’s a good idea!
Tom: got your tweet re the codesearch, looks sweet!