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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?

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    $\begingroup$ 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) $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Jan 10, 2015 at 23:05
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    $\begingroup$ @Fundamental: I wonder if it is the case to add a "search through Google" option, or just fix the parser. $\endgroup$
    – Jack D'Aurizio
    Jan 11, 2015 at 1:26
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    $\begingroup$ 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. $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Jan 11, 2015 at 1:34
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    $\begingroup$ Try uniquation.com/en (A suggestion posted in this meta thread: meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1388/…). $\endgroup$
    – Aryabhata
    Jan 11, 2015 at 19:07
  • $\begingroup$ 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 . $\endgroup$
    – flawr
    Jan 14, 2015 at 13:47
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    $\begingroup$ It is easy to find relevant posts containing expressions like this on approach0.xyz: approach0.xyz/search/… $\endgroup$
    – Wei Zhong
    Sep 11, 2016 at 13:57
  • $\begingroup$ 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. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Sep 15, 2016 at 16:01

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