

Ask HN: Good Programming Search Engines? - dgallagher

Does anyone have any recommendations regarding a good search engine specifically for programming topics? Ideally one which returns discussions or blog posts, rather than source code, explaining concepts, terms, and potentially discussions programmers have online. All non-programming results would be filtered out.<p>For example, Google "register" or "auto". These are C Storage Class Specifiers, but nothing relevant to C appears in the first 10 results. They're buried under lots of unrelated content. You can slap "+C" and "-C++" to get more specific, but you can quickly amass a very bloated query string. Copying/pasting programming terms out of a PDF for a quick search becomes cumbersome in some cases too. Google/Bing don't appear to have a filter to blot out all non-programming results.<p>There are plenty of source code search engines out there:<p>www.google.com/codesearch<p>www.koders.com<p>www.github.com<p>www.bitbucket.com<p>...and some community forums which do have great content:<p>www.stackoverflow.com<p>www.experts-exchange.com<p>...but no single centralized "Google for Programming". What search engine(s) do you recommend for programming topics? Do you have any search tips/hints to offer others?
======
srean
You may give <http://www.plre.org/> or <http://www.cdiggins.com/search/> a try
to see if it helps.

From the second link: "(PLRE.org) is a custom search engine created using the
Google co-op service.

The PLRE is designed primarily for researchers, students, language designers,
and language implementers who need reputable sources for advanced or esoteric
information pertaining to programming languages. This site has a heavy
emphasis on advanced topics in programming language theory, but can be useful
to find languages with particular features."

------
maxklein
I have been wanting this for a while too. Google used to be like that back in
early 2000s - tech stuff dominated the rankng. Now it's very mainstream stuff.

------
weaksauce
Have you tried duckduckgo?

------
DannyPhillips
This could be a good start up idea?

~~~
dgallagher
Possibly (you never know). Actually if you take the idea a bit further, you
could create "custom" search engines for various other topics.

For example, a search engine for chef's looking for new food to cook. A search
engine for auto-repair for do-it-yourselfers. And of course a programming one.
Basically, any major topic or profession.

This could be done by taking a large engine (such as Google) and customizing
its queries, filtering out non-relevant stuff. Because currently everything is
bunched up together in one giant index. It's not as efficient as it could be.

