Query help

Result quality is currently rather variable, mainly because I haven’t worked on tuning the ranking algorithm yet. Here are some tips for using it in its current state:

• There are not (yet) any search operators or advanced search syntax.
• Words are stemmed (e.g. “walking”, “walk”, “walked”, etc are all converted to “walk-”), and searched for individually. There is not yet any way to turn this off, or search for complete phrases.
• Non-alphanumeric characters are ignored. (Yes, this means you can’t search for things like symbolic operators, which is very awkward for a search engine specifically intended for programmers. This is on my list of things to fix.)
• The search is very literal; it does not look for synonyms or understand that the same word might have different meanings in different contexts. (This is the polar opposite of modern Google, which does its best to guess at what else you might have meant even if you have something very specific in mind. Which approach is most useful depends on how you’re trying to look for things.) Changing the phrasing of the query will probably get you a completely different set of pages.
• If a search isn’t finding what you’re looking for, try adding or removing words; sometimes seemingly minor tweaks return surprisingly different results. The result you need is probably in there somewhere even if the query is having trouble finding it.
• Sometimes, the good results are a bit buried. Skim through a few pages to see if what you’re looking for is a bit further down.
• If Feep!’s results are really unhelpful, you can always use the links at the bottom of the page to switch to a different search engine. Marginalia Search is particularly effective at turning up hidden gems that tend to get buried by the more mainstream search engines.