FYI: I clicked on get lucky, and went here: https://beta.sayhello.so/search?q=Check+if+string+is+a+palin... which for me in Safari is just an empty white page.
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Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
61–70 of 208 posts
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re still very early - of course it can't be as good. Could you tell me what you were trying to do and how it didn't work for you?
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 rap…
I agree that software documentation is constantly changing and a mechanism for evaluating the "freshness" of an answer could be very useful. Right now we provide an easy way to find the source of a code snippet but source attribution/evaluation is something we're actively looking into, especially for the natural language answer. A quantitative score could be interesting too. Thanks for the feedback!
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#63First 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…
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.
To each their own. I have 1 flow for search which I don't plan on changing and I personally have no issues with google search (for code, technical, or otherwise). I still consider it to be one of the best and I don't agree with the "google search is getting worse" crowd. Maybe at some point I'll use some kind of "search hydra" that hits multiple engines and either combines the results or shows me the results based on the type of search it thinks I'm doing but I don't imagine I'll ever want to consciously switch engines based on task.
Also I've never seen a "search result page full of YouTube videos" no matter what the query was. Sometimes there will be 3 or a carousel of them near the top but I can easily ignore that (assuming they aren't relevant or useful to me). I can't remember the last time I got a video for a code/technical query on google, I just did some testing and only a few queries showed videos, always 3, always partway down the page so that the search results at the top answered what I needed before I even got to the videos.
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#64I'm seeing the same page as result 1, 2 and 3. Interestingly only 1 out of those 3 results were scraped from that page. Even more curiously only 1 out of those 3 results were even valid code. https://beta.sayhello.so/search?q=hello+world+in+brainfuck Nice idea for the project though. Good luck with it
Our code extraction/ranking model hasn't been trained on that language yet, so it's definitely an out-of-domain example. We'll keep working on expanding our repertoire!
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#65Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#66I see whole solutions copied from other websites displayed on your site. Is that legal? Isn't there copyright on those?
I would hope it's not legal. > Hello pulls in the raw text from all five search results linked on the search page to generate... Not to be negative but I think I'll stick to the sites and people that made the results and not a middleman that intends to charge for other people's work.
I think that framing is missing some nuance. Seems more like they would be charging for the process that goes into sifting through those results and pulling out other people's work on the user's behalf.
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To each their own. I have 1 flow for search which I don't plan on changing and I personally have no issues with google search (for code, technical, or otherwise). I still consider it to be one of the best and I don't agree with the "google search is getting worse" crowd. Maybe at some point I'll use some kind of "search hydra" that hits multiple engines and either combines the results or shows me the results based on…
In your first comment, you say you want high information density. In this one, you say if there are irrelevant results on Google, you'll just ignore them and scroll past.
I get that there's always a high bar to switch to a new tool, and Google obviously has certain advantages that are tough to replicate, but it seems like you're applying a bit of a double standard. If Google shows me a bunch of ads and irrelevant results that I have to parse through to find what I'm looking for, that's not high information density; it's quite the opposite.
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
To each their own. I have 1 flow for search which I don't plan on changing and I personally have no issues with google search (for code, technical, or otherwise). I still consider it to be one of the best and I don't agree with the "google search is getting worse" crowd. Maybe at some point I'll use some kind of "search hydra" that hits multiple engines and either combines the results or shows me the results based on…
In your first comment, you say you want high information density. In this one, you say if there are irrelevant results on Google, you'll just ignore them and scroll past. I get that there's always a high bar to switch to a new tool, and Google obviously has certain advantages that are tough to replicate, but it seems like you're applying a bit of a double standard. If Google shows me a bunch of ads and irrelevant res…
With one dominant search provider, we are constantly conditioned to parse the results from Google. It is very easy to ignore certain parts of the page and mentally process which parts of the page your brain is interested in.
So, while it’s not necessarily “information dense”, finding the information you need is comparatively “cognitively light”. Or at least predictable…
The devil you know…
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#69First 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…
UI: Feels overpadded to me, I'd like to be able to see more stuff without scrolling so far
Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
To each their own. I have 1 flow for search which I don't plan on changing and I personally have no issues with google search (for code, technical, or otherwise). I still consider it to be one of the best and I don't agree with the "google search is getting worse" crowd. Maybe at some point I'll use some kind of "search hydra" that hits multiple engines and either combines the results or shows me the results based on…
In your first comment, you say you want high information density. In this one, you say if there are irrelevant results on Google, you'll just ignore them and scroll past. I get that there's always a high bar to switch to a new tool, and Google obviously has certain advantages that are tough to replicate, but it seems like you're applying a bit of a double standard. If Google shows me a bunch of ads and irrelevant res…
Both things can be true and you are omitting/ignoring part of my comment about irrelevant results. Higher density of information means I can scan faster and see more with less/no scrolling. As for irrelevant results I called out that the relevant results were above the videos (irrelevant, to me in this context, content). Lastly, I very rarely get ads when doing technical searches so that doesn't really factor in here. I'd wager I get what I want within the first 3-4 results on google reliably (at least when it comes to technical/programming-related searches) and when I don't it's normally super niche (it also rarely has videos or other stuff in the results, think: error messages).