
Crokage: A New Way to Search Stack Overflow - ingve
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/08/14/crokage-a-new-way-to-search-stack-overflow/
======
w-m
Around 2013 it was bothering me that the process of typing my question into
Google, then clicking on the first result, then scrolling down to the most
useful answer took so much time and interaction, to get simple answers of
things I just couldn't remember. Let's say I forgot how to concatenate a list
of strings in Python and wanted to find out.

So I built [http://www.stacksnippet.com/](http://www.stacksnippet.com/) back
then, leveraging Google search results which work well for natural queries and
retrieving the StackOverflow answers. The actual answers are listed directly
on the search page in a compact format.

After dogfooding this for a while I found that it really is just not that
useful. The questions that I had that could be answered in one-liners came in
bursts, but the format wasn't great for answering all queries I had.

Not figuring out a good direction where to go with this I abandoned it quickly
after building, but it's nice that it's still working, 5 years later (albeit
without https).

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gregmac
Glad to see this at least orders by votes.

One of the problems StackOverflow is facing due to its age is that what was
(correctly) accepted as the best answer 5 years ago isn't always the best
answer today. For some questions, the better answer has more upvotes, and this
reflects that.

I kind of wish StackOverflow had something like "Order by most votes in the
past year" or "Order by most recent 50% of votes" or something, as it would
probably be more accurate, but I get that it's complex both technically and
from a UX perspective.

~~~
robocat
I wish stackoverflow would come up with a way to make an expert's votes count
more. It already has a system for a vote's value to go from 0 (you can't) to
1. I want each of Jon Skeet's votes to be worth more (or more depending on
knowledge domain like C#?). Maybe the top limit is a 4x multiplier?

I would like the same for hacker news e.g. if patio11 adds the 1000th comment
in a thread, I want to see it. Perhaps even individually ranked: opt in to get
a clintside ordering of a discussion that uses my own up and down votes to
help re-rank the comments.

Stackoverflow is frustrating because experts get much the same influence as
ignorants. I am forced to read every answer and comment to find the
information gold (the ranking helps, but it doesn't help enough). Best answers
almost invariably are written badly and don't cover corner cases (possibly it
is because I usually have to find JavaScript answers, or because JavaScript is
hard to write well).

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moltensodium
I can't ever think of a time I opened up SO to figure out the correct
algorithm to use for a specific problem, for me the use case 90% of the time
is "This library/module/system does not work like it supposed to and now some
other abstraction is leaking"

If you could automate a way to understand and resolve all the bizarre bugs and
leaky abstractions in the world of tech now that would be a service!

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jookyboi
The initial results for my search queries look pretty good. Looking forward to
having StackOverflow integrate this into their API.

Would be a great workflow to explore for our app:
[https://www.cacher.io](https://www.cacher.io)

~~~
marcmaia
Indeed there might be an interesting synergy on both concepts, Crokage and
Cacher! Did you ever think about creating a collaborative space for sharing
snippets and their short explanations? Or maybe a repository of well-
documented snippets, where a search mechanism such as Crokage would be
applicable?

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ThetaOneOne
This is going to be a great step in the right direction for early devs on
stackoverflow. I really hope this cuts down on the duplicate questions which
is both good for the askers and the rest of us.

~~~
masud2336
Great suggestion! More features will be added in the later version for sure.

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Gys
> This is beta version. For now, we only provide solutions for Java.

