# Improving the search system

When recognizing some questions as duplicates, sometimes it is difficult to find the original question one remembers. For instance, I recently saw a question asking to prove that $$\forall x\in(-1,1),\qquad \log(1+x)=\sum_{n\geq 1}\frac{(-1)^{n+1}}{n}z^n.$$ If we try to search $\log(1+x)$ we can see that the parenthesis are stripped, so the system looks for questions containing \log1 and finds nothing. One can circumvent this issue by searching $\log (1+x)$ and being luckier. Anyway I think that the search system is quite far from being efficient, especially about $\LaTeX$ support.

Do you have any ideas about improving it?

• Not a suggestion for improving built-in search, but entering taylor log(1+x) site:math.stackexchange.com in Google gives desired results. (This in particular)
– user147263
Jan 10 '15 at 23:05
• @Fundamental: I wonder if it is the case to add a "search through Google" option, or just fix the parser. Jan 11 '15 at 1:26
• Even if math parsing is improved, I don't expect the free elasticsearch engine to match the capability of a multi-billion enterprise. The built-in search is great for filtering on tags, score, and other SE-specific parameters. For full-text search, not so great.
– user147263
Jan 11 '15 at 1:34
• Try uniquation.com/en (A suggestion posted in this meta thread: meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1388/…). Jan 11 '15 at 19:07
• Just as an inspiratino: There is kind of a 'backwards' math search website here: searchonmath.com Try e.g. \frac 4 n = \frac 1 a + \frac 1 b + \frac 1 c . Jan 14 '15 at 13:47
• It is easy to find relevant posts containing expressions like this on approach0.xyz: approach0.xyz/search/… Sep 11 '16 at 13:57
• In connection with the previous @WeiZhong's comment it is worth mentioning that more complete information on that project can be found here: Announcing a third-party search engine for Math StackExchange. Sep 15 '16 at 16:01