How to search || and or on StackOverflow?

Question

One of my questions was closed, because of being a duplicate. My question is how can I search for duplicates for my original question. The keywords in my mind are:

 ||
 or
 ruby
 rails

Putting the four in the Stackoverflow search box didn't return anything meaningful. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can now search for symbols by using quotes. For example the relevant search here is: ruby "||"

Answer 2

SymbolHound is a search engine that allows you to do these kinds of searches: http://symbolhound.com/

It seems to return very relevant results for your example search of ||: http://symbolhound.com/?q=||

Its index right now is almost entirely Stack Overflow, although that should change in the future as its index grows to include all programming sites. If you only want to search SO there's an advanced search feature where you can limit the search by site.

Full disclosure: I am a co-founder and developer of SymbolHound.

Answer 3

IIRC, this bug has been reported multiple times already. Unfortunately, not only does it look like the bug will never be fixed, the developers responsible for the StackOverflow search engine refuse to acknowledge that it even exists.

So, you're basically stuck with what I do: read every single question, keep a list of questions that ask about unsearchable terms and direct people to those questions.

See also:

• Is it possible to search for punctuation/special characters?
• How Could We Fix “The Ternary Operator Problem”
• Search ignores leading/trailing underscore?
• How do I search for syntax stuff like “===”?
• How can I search for a string containing a colon?
• Shouldn't all characters be searchable on a programmer's QA site?
• Searching for C & C++ identifiers like __FILE__, __func__, etc.
• Search terms with dollar signs ($) are ignored
• How to search for special characters on Stack Overflow?
• ':' not allowed in searches
• Searching for *=
• Can I search for “A*” on stack overflow?
• We need to be able to search for punctuation (symbols)

As you can see, the problem is neither new nor obscure.

Also related:

• Is it possible to search for words with an apostrophe, like “doesn't”?

Answer 4

Look at the search page... basically you can look for the tag names by putting them in brackets:

[ruby][rails]

As for the || I doubt you can find that... if you can't find it on google, you can't find it with this search engine.

Answer 5

The question it's a duplicate of is listed in the ruby tag FAQ https://stackoverflow.com/tags/ruby/faq , but I'm planning on asking a question asking "What hard-to-google concepts exist in ruby?".

Answer 6

Seems my comment above was incorrect: Google is no help with this, at least searching for "||" (maybe I'm doing it wrong).

The solution, albeit imperfect, is to apply the [logical-operators] or [bitwise-operators], etc. tag(s) (as appropriate) to all of these types of questions. Essentially, convert the special unsearchable character sequences into a description of what they mean in tag format. At least that way, they are searchable within Stack Overflow if you know enough to search by tags.