Happy Friday! I built Doc Search with the generous help and advice of my wife. During a long car ride, we got to talking about the increasing difficulty of finding in-depth information on many topics using consumer-focused search engines. She lamented the disappearance of the option to show only PDFs in the search results as well as the shift toward "helpfully" ignoring some of the terms or directives she would try to add to a query to refine it.
I think I understand (at least some of) the constraints and incentives that push consumer search engines to work the way they do and I suspect the current state of the art strikes a good balance in accommodating them. After all, there are a lot of really smart people working on the problem.
By scoping the problem differently, I suspect that smaller operators can build tools shaped by different constraints and incentives and provide better service to their respective niches. Doc Search is my contribution to this effort. We've been using it for the past eighteen months or so as I've worked to grow the index. It's getting to the point where it usually gets us useful results, so I thought it would be a good time to share it and solicit broader feedback.
I hope you find it useful! Please let me know what you think. I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have.
