

Show HN: Recalll – Search Engine for programmers and developers - parvbhullar
https://recalll.co/app/

======
BaptisteGreve
It reminds me of an article from Paul Graham:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

"The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A
search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else
would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google
was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade
the idea of switching seems thinkable to me.

Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers,
the route is at least straightforward: make the search engine you yourself
want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Make it really good for code
search, for example. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete?
Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good."

~~~
parvbhullar
hahaha man, you made my day :) thanks

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w-m
Great project, a usable search engine for programmers would be a fantastic
tool to have.

Realising that Google still delivers the most relevant results for the things
I want to look up quickly I created
[http://www.stacksnippet.com/](http://www.stacksnippet.com/) last year. It
takes the first Google results from your query and displays stack overflow
answers inline.

Recall seems exciting, I'll be sure to follow it.

~~~
parvbhullar
thanks alot, stacksnippet.com is also a good tool.

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parvbhullar
This is search engine for developers and programmers, it enables you to search
across websites as well as cloud apps. I'm looking for feedback. Thanks

~~~
spotman
Cool efforts so far. I can see the use case for wanting to find information
across multiple sites.

Couple feedback points.

1 - the ui in your screenshot on the home page
([https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png](https://recalll.co/theme/flat/img/search.png)),
in the results section you have the title as blue. At least in safari, in real
life its black. This makes the results all run together and visually be hard
to quickly tell where one result ends and the next begins.

2 - if I was to use it for actual work, the search "nsfetchedresultscontroller
duplicates" would be something that I have searched for recently.
unfortunately nothing really useful came up on this recalll.co. Maybe a good
example to test against google, stack overflow, and quora.

3 - not sure if the types of queries I want to put in to search asana or
evernote, would be the same types of queries I would want to search the web /
blogs / stack overflow. I suppose maybe the use case is, just use recall, and
we'll figure it out. But sometimes I may want to search for something silly
like "s3 credentials from bob", which might producer weird results in stack
overflow for example, because there is probably lot of people talking about s3
credentials, but its completely out of context, and I would want the results
from evernote or something. (whether evernote is a good place to store those
of course is probably another discussion, but to illustrate the point)

4 - some people won't install chrome extensions. if I try to search right from
your homepage, the animated help thing starts to overwrite my input. whatever
I'm searching, if its not already open, I want to open it quickly, and execute
the search immediately.

Great work though. The concept is cool. Maybe you could end up like
duckduckgo, for programmers.

~~~
parvbhullar
thank man, for your valuable points.

For 1 - Ya I also think blue is good for title color. i changed it some time
back to black will revert back to blue.

2 - due to lack of data results are not good, crawler is continuously running,
once we have enough data, that wont be a problem.

3 - for cloud apps - you hit exactly on the point that's why we added cloud
apps, to target specific site or app you can choose app name in query like "s3
credentials from bob evernote", it will do the trick for you until more usable
is developed.

4 - Yes chrome extension installation is bit tricky but right now don't have
anything more innovative will figure it out. Search form on home page is
symbolic, its not actual search. Initial idea is to take user to search page,
definitely club both the pages to single one, like most of search engines are
doing.

~~~
spotman
Cool, keep hacking away. Bookmarked.

------
song0ku
Searched for "javascript date", got the date. Didn't know what to expect. "Thu
May 28 2015 16:41:46 GMT+0100 (WEST)"

"javascript while(1)" also gives interesting results

~~~
parvbhullar
there is broken code while searching for particular queries. will fix that.
thanks for pointing out.

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mijoharas
I'm happy to finally find a search engine giving good results for `>=>
haskell`[0] as I can never find good information on those symbols and never
remember them.

One problem, the link to the browser extension seems to be broken [1].

[0]
[https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell](https://recalll.co/app/?q=%3E%3D%3E%20haskell)

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recalll/kimdaoebjjibiloijimmadljadhcakpi)

~~~
parvbhullar
good to hear that, it answered your query. yes chrome extension link is
broken, fix will be available soon.

~~~
mijoharas
Seems like it's fixed now. Thanks.

------
stkni
Nice idea, nicely executed. Tiny suggestion: I'd put a little more white space
between the search results. I'm finding it hard to distinguish between
different results.

~~~
parvbhullar
sure.

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ohitsdom
I was playing with async controllers in .NET last night and was looking up a
lot of reference material. Recalll's results were surprisingly great- well
done!

[https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller](https://recalll.co/app/?q=.net%20async%20controller)

~~~
parvbhullar
glad to hear that. thanks

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sokoloff
I love the idea, so I immediately gave it a shot.

[https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci](https://recalll.co/app/?q=haskell%20fibonnaci)
doesn't give me any useful results. Same query on google gives me exclusively
useful results (at least on page 1).

I wish you the best for your project, and I'm sharing my use case in the hopes
you can continue to improve, not to discourage.

Edit: Doh; it's because I can't spell. Two c's and 1 n and I do get some
relevant results. Google has the "fix it for me" hidden from me.

~~~
parvbhullar
will add query suggestion and "did you mean" functionality for more suggestive
queries.

------
59nadir
Searching for "racket parallelism" does not really give anything relevant. In
this case I searched for something that is extensively written about in the
actual Racket documentation, both in the guide and reference material, so I
know what I would expect.

It's a very natural search to do if you're thinking about parallelism and
concurrency (both of which are suggested by Google, for example), but I assume
most Racket users use the excellent documentation search for Racket. If you
indexed that you'd probably get great results.

~~~
parvbhullar
yes due to lack of data results are not relevent, definatally index
documentation for racket. good points though. thanks

------
rmason
I asked it what is Lucee? I got back some gibberish about JavaScript. The
answer is an open source scripting language on the JVM.

The first ten replies on Google were correct as was Wikipedia:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee)

Wondering just when you did your crawl as Lucee has only been around since
January?

~~~
parvbhullar
the reason is we didn't crawl wikipedia yet, we are planing to do that very
soon.

------
tempodox
Google still finds way better results for “complex gamma function”, for
example. I have yet to see a search engine that can take on the Goog, let
alone surpass it. I wonder what it would take to accomplish that...

~~~
parvbhullar
What you are saying is ambitious, this is first beta release of product, we do
have vision to take on google at least for programmers but it will take time,
right people and resources. I hope next release much better than this one in
terms of speed, relevancy, technology, search algos and data. though very
motivating points. thanks

~~~
tempodox
I realise it's ambitious, but in the end, if you can't at least (have hopes
to) compete with Google, what would be the point in starting a search engine
project at all? Roughly, all your prospective users are Google users now.

You have my best wishes to succeed.

~~~
parvbhullar
totally agree with you. as i told you we have vision to acquire users from
mainstream search engines, what i'm asking is more time. though thanks a lot
for your wishes.

------
meesterdude
this looks interesting; though i think the design should be more search
focused like how google's homepage is; with the searchbar at the top is good
for results, but it should be more center for the homepage; like, there's a
bunch of other stuff going on there that I don't care about; i'm there to
search. It's distracting, really.

Otherwise, keep at it! the more diversity we have the better.

~~~
parvbhullar
good points, added to TODO.

------
karn09
Pretty neat idea! I think it would be really cool to declare my default
languages though, so it only returns results from what I specified.

~~~
parvbhullar
good suggestion, added to TODO.

------
mzjs
Great idea, will use.

One thing I'd really like to see is cheat sheets. For example, "regex
cheatsheet".

~~~
parvbhullar
great suggestion.

------
Mizza
Or..

$ pip install howdoi

$ howdoi reverse string python

> 'hello world'[::-1]

> 'dlrow olleh'

