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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

What you should make is a specialist search engine for hackers. They're the early adopters in search engines, so if you get them you have the quickest path to getting everyone else.

Imagine how alarmed Google would be if there were a different search engine the top 10k hackers all used, even if they had everyone else. And rightly so.

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Heh. I'm not amongst the top 10k, but I've been cursing yesterday, trying to use search to find out in what version / gem of ruby {|[]| } is a valid block (with just being random variable names). And a week before that the same problem when trying to find out what &@/ ment in a mathematica script.

Search engines tend to ignore symbols in normal search, and while you can search for symbols in google's code search, that doesn't include any documentation or pages where they explain a particular syntax.

Indeed. Good luck finding out information for the common shell <<END feature if you don't know that's called a "here document".

That's optimistic, but to be successful with "hackers" the search engine would most likely have to steer its user experience in directions that wouldn't appeal to an everyday user. Typically, us geeks want both maximum control and elegant usability, always preferring control to usability. With most users, the inverse is true.

Sure, there are obstacles, but my instincts tell me a clever person could find their way around them. Or at least, considering the size of the prize, the odds of finding a solution makes the problem worth taking a shot at.

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