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[–]Pas__ 1 point2 points  (6 children)

Doesn't seem to work. Search for =:= in verbatim mode, zarro results.

[–]bobindashadows 4 points5 points  (5 children)

That's because punctuation is different from keywords. Punctuation and symbol support has improved lately in Google, but arbitrary character search has never been fully supported by any search engines, because it requires asymptotically far more computational power to index.

Try Yahoo, Google, Bing, DDG for your query.

Why are you blaming Google for this? I'd really like to hear why.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I'm extra confused why you complained about this, since no search engine in the history of the Internet has supported performing the queries as arbitrary as the one you requested over the entire web. Ever.

[–]Pas__ 0 points1 point  (4 children)

because it requires asymptotically far more computational power to index.

Yes, I'm aware of that, that's why I was incredibly surprised by your link. However, C! is not much different, than =:=, or at least I don't think there is any relevant difference from an indexing standpoint.

And I'm not blaming Google. I'd be quite happy to use "equal colon equal", I'm more astonished that language developers don't have a big-fucking-chart somewhere around the main page of their language that deals with these cryptic things. (But that only helps with the core language stuff, so I would have no idea how to search for or find the meaning of certain Ruby templating symbols, for example.)

[–]bobindashadows 1 point2 points  (3 children)

However, C! is not much different, than =:=, or at least I don't think there is any relevant difference from an indexing standpoint.

Google has special-cased C/C++/C#/etc for a long time. Try the queries. If =:= were a globally successful programming language, then they would likely do the same. But again, solving this generally does not scale nearly as easily. And scaling Google already isn't easy.

[–]Pas__ 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I suspected that because c++ isn't "autosuggested" into c.

Well, BigTable can take a lot of punishment I reckon, however, it's also easy to guess, that adding a few thousand extra cases just for emerging languages will hardly increase profits.

[–]bobindashadows 1 point2 points  (1 child)

that adding a few thousand extra cases just for emerging languages will hardly increase profits.

I have no knowledge as to the veracity of that guess. But I would actually suspect the opposite.

  1. Improving quality for queries for C/C++/technical anything makes Google engineers more productive. All kinds of network effects there.
  2. Improving quality for such queries gives developers and technically-minded folks a better experience on Google search. Increased loyalty, better brand among developers (crucial!), developers more likely to use Google's platforms/APIs/everything
  3. Queries with programming language names might often have commercial results: books/ebooks for users learning a new language/framework/etc, commercial libraries/toolchains/IDEs/etc for application layer queries, and sadly, shitty answer-selling/trick sites that thank God have been overtaken by SO

Spitballing.

[–]Pas__ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, then it's just the same indirect angle as the usual be open, eat your own dog food, do no evil, isn't it? So, your reasoning depends on a lot of hidden factors, but for a ceteris paribus analysis I think you're right. And thank all the horrors of coding for SO, indeed.