Ask HN: General purpose search engine that will respect special characters?

4 pointswhat-if2mo ago4 comments

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.

4 comments

-__-2mo 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-ifOP1mo 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.

eimrine2mo ago

Qwant, Gibiru and Lilo.

Source: googled that for you.

what-ifOP2mo ago

These search engines don't fullfil my request.

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.

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