#1487 Fantom and (non-hegemonic but cool) search engines

altiplano Sat 9 Apr 2011

Hi folks,

From what I read here, Fan became Fantom mostly due to search engine issues.

Many people know and use Bing and Google. But beside these two heavy-weights there are some other valuable engines like Ixquick, DuckDuckGo and Blekko to name a few (I learnt about the latter two today). One can say these are geeky-inclined services. Well maybe but they also gain popularity among people concerned about privacy diet or spam overdose.

Speaking about popularity, Fantom may benefit from being included into their specific search features :

-DuckDuckGo uses !Bang and would get !fantom (it already has !java, !dotnet, !android ...)

-Blekko uses slashtag and would get /fantom (yep it now has /java, /dotnet etc)

Both engines accept suggestions for new entries.

At worst, one guy or two with the curiosity gene could see Fantom in the list and start to explore. At best, Fantom will beat Ghostbusters and Scoobidoo in the collective memory :-)

..:DuckDuckGo:..

main page is https://duckduckgo.com/

!Bang tech goodies page is https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html

..:Blekko:..

main page is https://blekko.com/

slashtag list is https://blekko.com/tag/show?t=3

(You can ofc go there https or http as you wish.)

brian Sun 10 Apr 2011

Good ideas, especially would like to do !fantom for DuckDuckGo. Although looks like you need a clean search URI. Since we are in place of rewriting sidewalk (which will include how search works), probably best to hold off until we release the revamped website.

altiplano Tue 12 Apr 2011

You are right Brian, the feature asks for a "!Bang Url", which could be http://fantom.org/?q={{{s}}} so yes, better wait for the replacement you mention indeed.

About language name and search engine issues, here's how Clean a functional programming language dealt with it. As Clean can run the same process on several computers, it is also called "Concurrent Clean" (from http://wiki.clean.cs.ru.nl/FAQ). Did not help it to pierce that much though it seems.

Still about language and popularity, a page that may be of interest for some:

http://www.langpop.com/

"[They] have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity."

Login or Signup to reply.