Friday 8 March 2013

Use Symbol Hound to search for symbols

Symbol Hound

I stumbled upon this little gem, a search engine called Symbol Hound that unlike Google, doesn't ignore symbols in fast it is actually optimised for searching with them. It only searches within Stack Overflow but that means it's very focused on programming and really if you're not finding your answer to a programming operator question on SO, it deserves to be asked.

For a long time now I've searched Google using quotes around the term for things like C# "+= operator" hoping that it would work this time. Finally searching for symbols should be a breeze :)

Here are the top 5 results from Stack Overflow, Google and Symbol Hound for the search term "C# [] operator". Both Stack Overflow and Google actually ignore the brackets and just search for "C# operator".

Stack Overflow

  • Q: && and || operators
  • Q: &&= and ||= operators [closed]
  • Q: Meaning of “| =” operator?
  • Q: Meaning of a** operator
  • Q: operation of for loop

Google

  • C# Operators
  • ?? Operator (C# Reference)
  • ?: Operator (C# Reference)
  • C# => operator? - Stack Overflow
  • c# - ?: ?? Operators Instead Of IF|ELSE - Stack Overflow

Symbol Hound

  • How do I overload the [] operator in C#
  • Access C++/CLI Overloaded [] Operator in C#
  • Ruby's equivalent to C#'s ?? operator
  • Building an object with a [] interface ( not from ILIst) in c#
  • Simulating C# indexer in C++

Way more on accurate!