Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

Not sure what the original commenter was looking for but I can give my thoughts:

- stackoverflow's UI actually serves well to provide a sort of "ambient" information that rapidly indicates not just the best answers, but the best most-recent answers. Oftentimes, and especially in rapidly-evolving dev languages/frameworks, what was the best answer a few months ago may no longer be the best answer and the ability to rapidly scan the comments that would indicate this is valuable. - in addition those stackoverflow comments and links within them can point to additional info that can save the dev time (potentially pointing to the dev misidentifying the problem: "don't do this, this is the real issue ).

I think with the traditional google->stackoverflow or google->[some documentation site, forum, etc] user flow you actually get layers of ambient cues as to relevance, recency and quality that we've grown accustom to. Even if your product ultimately serves better answers I'd worry that lacking these cues would make a user like me feel as though I'm blindly trusting an answer that seems to have come from the ether (sort of like github copilot).

As low-hanging fruit maybe adding level-meters beside each result that indicates these dimensions could help (like npmjs.com does with npm pkg results in their ui).

I love the product idea and it looks like a strong start! Good luck!

Hey so I built a search engine doing largely the same thing (and also interviewed with YC during the W20 time) and ultimately we pivoted away due to lack of interest from the developer teams we were pitching, often the startups we were pitching didn't have enough accumulated internal knowledge for the paid plan to be useful. For the ones who did (at the like 200+ person 5+ yrs in business mark) we still weren't seeing the problem being painful enough where companies wanted to pay to solve it.

How do you see navigating this space when this can be considered a nice to have versus a strict need?

First Impressions:

* I won't use a different search engine for programmers stuff vs everything else. So while this might be targeted toward software developers I can't see myself using it unless it can handle normal searches.

* UI/UX - I hate the progress bar, I'm not sure at all what it's telling me as there are results shown while it's still completing. The results are way too spaced out. On my 27" 2K screen I can only see 3 results, the search bar takes up way too much space and there is way too much padding on the results. Don't move the DOM on me, removing the progress bar is jarring as is "Was this answer helpful?" popping in, I'm here for results, not to train your ML.

* Trackers - Using the default installs of Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin meant no results ever loaded. I'm not sure what was being blocked that caused the issue but cookies from bing [0] and a request to cloudflareinsights.com [1] should not hamper showing results.

Search is a tool and one that I need to be quick, simple, and informationally dense. This checks almost none of those boxes. I'm even open to using a different search engine (I semi-recently switched from Google to Ecosia and it's been near-seamless), but I don't see any "pro" to using this engine and I see a ton of "cons".

[0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/V5uiyM

[1] https://cs.joshstrange.com/GkPuap

EDIT: I did a few more searches because I realized I wasn't getting the "info box"/ML results on my first few searches and I wanted to be fair. Sorry but that made me dislike this even more. I really, really hate content moving out from under me. My eyes start reading one of the 3 results that was shown then they got pushed down for another overly-padded box that tried to "answer" my question. The results were worse than "grab the selected answer from the first SO that matches this query". Maybe it would be better if that info was shown off to the side and didn't move the results when it loaded in but again, I didn't find it useful in the queries where it showed up.

EDIT2: I posted a follow up comment about what, specifically, I think should be changed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005841

I definitely see the benefit of a separate code search engine and would use it. Google has, as you have notice, gotten way less useful. A big part of that is trying to target the wider market to the exclusion of less popular searches, like developers'. A dedicated engine would help with that.

I'm more than willing to open another tab to not have a search result page full of YouTube videos.