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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#131

Post by rushingcreek »

joshgachnang wrote: post #125

This suffers from one of the things I've been hating about Google lately: it doesn't use exactly what I typed in. Case in point: "react-native-navigation" is an entirely different package than "react-navigation". I query about RNN and get results about RN. I get this is due to Bing, but it could be a fundamental flaw with the approach (for me at least) The animations and page jumpiness are a bit off-putting and slow,…

Yep, we feel that frustration -- it's our intention to use exactly what you typed in, but here Bing is messing up. Using results from our own index should make this less of an issue in the future.

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

#132

Post by wayy »

radiojasper wrote: post #127

I searched for 'iife javascript' and although it understood what I was searching for, it's 3 code examples only showed an iife on the 3rd code example. the 2nd one didn't make sense at all [0] [0] https://beta.sayhello.so/search?q=iife+javascript

Thanks for trying it out - we're still pretty early so the code search feature won't be perfect. The model works best with natural language queries, however, so you might find better results by giving the search engine more to work with.

https://beta.sayhello.so/search?q=Immediately+Invoked+Functi...

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

#134

Post by wayy »

CodeSgt wrote: post #122
wayy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The description of the steps you took is super helpful feedback - thanks! Hello performs best on "how-to" questions at the moment. We're still working to improve troubleshooting type queries.

That'll be a difficult adaptation for potential users to make. I think most of us have been conditioned to phrase our queries a certain way to achieve the best results from Google. Then again maybe that's just me.

You're right in that moving away from Google is a huge behavioral change. While our model does prefer natural language queries, what I was really referring to are the different categories of developer searches. Ad-hoc how-tos are a type of search where the developer knows what to do but not exactly how e.g "how to set a cookie in fastapi." Troubleshooting searches are things like copy-pasting a compile error, or "why is X behavior not working."

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

#136

Post by lysecret »

Hey so, I have been working on a specialized search engine (at least you can think of it in this way). And for me a lot of the gains came because we could structure and restrain the search space in a meaningful way, such that we could build better distance metrics than a pure text search could do.

I wonder what you think about that. Maybe one could submit a code snippet, or mark something as an error, or ask for a refactor of some code. But then again, this gets close to what copilot is doing.

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

#139

Post by duderific »

ForrestN wrote: post #128
wayy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've tested it on the latest version of Safari. Maybe try on an updated browser?

It's totally up to date. From the console: "TypeError: N.at is not a function. (In 'N.at(-1)', 'N.at' is undefined)"

I get the same error in latest Safari.

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

#140

Post by rushingcreek »

Fede_V wrote: post #137

You.com has a similar code search specific product. What do you plan to offer that they don't?

There are a few key differences. The main one is that our AI generates an explanation to answer your question directly; we go significantly further than they do in terms of synthesizing explanations. Same goes for snippets; on You.com, you usually need to click on a button (.e.g "Open Side Panel") to get a code snippet which adds friction. Furthermore, they seem to be simply showing the full Stack Overflow page; our approach is to find and rank the most relevant code snippet while offering a "See Reference" button to make it easy to go to the original page.

Overall, our goal is to have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any search engine when it comes to developer searches.

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