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

4 pointsposted 3 days ago
by what-if

Item id: 46745928

3 Comments

-__-

2 days 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/

eimrine

3 days ago

Qwant, Gibiru and Lilo.

Source: googled that for you.

what-if

2 days 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.