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Searching pypi.org, is there an 'advanced search'?

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Chris Green

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Jul 17, 2021, 8:03:21 AM7/17/21
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Every time I go to pypi.org to look for a neat utility or something I
curse the stupid search.

Is there really no better search available? Apart from anything else
it appears to OR the elements together so, for example, I wanted to
search for programs/libraries that will allow me to access Google
Contacts:-

Putting the words Google and Contacts in the search box produces
more than 10000 hits.

Putting just Google in the search box produces 8,629 projects.

So, it would appear the terms are OR'ed together, surely OR'ing terms
in a search (by default) went out with the ark!

When I put 'Google contacts' in the search box I want projects that
have both 'Google' AND 'Contacts' in their description somewhere!
(... and, no, I tried 'Google AND Contacts', still more than 10000
results).

pypi.org is a wonderful resource but its size now demands a better
search engine.

--
Chris Green
·

Avi Gross

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Jul 17, 2021, 9:30:05 PM7/17/21
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Chris,

Just a bit off topic, but google does have some advanced features such as using the word AND or putting something in quotes to make it search for the combination written the same way.

Some of the tricks work for other search engines too. Google does have an advanced search feature here:

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

For example you may insist on ALL THESE WORDS for a page to be shown or words not to be on the page and more such as only find things on some web site.

Good luck.

I did such a search for having both google and contacts on just pypi.org and got only 2050 results! LOL!

https://www.google.com/search?as_q=google+contacts&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=pypi.org&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&tbs=
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Mark Lawrence

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Jul 17, 2021, 9:39:55 PM7/17/21
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As this is an open source project I'm looking forward to the huge amount of work that you personally will be putting in to remedy this situation. In summary put up or shut up :)

MRAB

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Jul 17, 2021, 9:43:52 PM7/17/21
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There's always Google. I find that the search terms:

"google contacts" pypi

finds some results.

Peter Otten

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Jul 18, 2021, 3:48:48 AM7/18/21
to
On 18/07/2021 03:40, MRAB wrote:
> On 2021-07-17 13:01, Chris Green wrote:

>> pypi.org is a wonderful resource but its size now demands a better
>> search engine.
>>
> There's always Google. I find that the search terms:
>
>     "google contacts" pypi
>
> finds some results.

With a small modification

"google contacts" site:pypi.org

the number of results goes down to 25 (of which 13 are shown by default).

Chris Green

unread,
Jul 18, 2021, 4:18:20 AM7/18/21
to
Mark Lawrence <bream...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, July 17, 2021 at 1:03:21 PM UTC+1, Chris Green wrote:
> > Every time I go to pypi.org to look for a neat utility or something I
> > curse the stupid search.
> >
> > Is there really no better search available? Apart from anything else
> > it appears to OR the elements together so, for example, I wanted to
> > search for programs/libraries that will allow me to access Google
> > Contacts:-
> >
> > Putting the words Google and Contacts in the search box produces
> > more than 10000 hits.
> >
> > Putting just Google in the search box produces 8,629 projects.
> >
> > So, it would appear the terms are OR'ed together, surely OR'ing terms
> > in a search (by default) went out with the ark!
> >
> > When I put 'Google contacts' in the search box I want projects that
> > have both 'Google' AND 'Contacts' in their description somewhere!
> > (... and, no, I tried 'Google AND Contacts', still more than 10000
> > results).
> >
> > pypi.org is a wonderful resource but its size now demands a better
> > search engine.
> >
>
> As this is an open source project I'm looking forward to the huge amount
> of work that you personally will be putting in to remedy this situation.
> In summary put up or shut up :)

I'm quite happy to help, however I was just asking (maybe rather more
agressively than I should have done) if I was missing something
obvious. E.g. is there some syntax that I don't know about that I can
use in the search box, or maybe I should use an external search engine?

... and Open Source doesn't mean one can't criticise surely, rather
the opposite! :-) (I have, by the way, contributed in a minor way to
quite a few open source projects over the years, and that's a lot of
years! I even have a small credit in the 'bible' for the Kermit file
transfer protocol, remember that?)

--
Chris Green
·

Chris Green

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Jul 18, 2021, 4:33:18 AM7/18/21
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But of course that only finds places where the words "google contacts"
occur together. I think I (OP) should probably try:-

google contacts site:pypi.org

I don't use Google but I tried it on my preferrred search engine
(DuckDuckGo) and it produces rather more than 25 results but, as
they're sorted (among other things) by the distance between the words
'google' and 'contacts' (I think) it produces the sort of result I was
hoping for.

Thanks all.

--
Chris Green
·

Christian Heimes

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Jul 18, 2021, 2:27:31 PM7/18/21
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PyPI used to have a search API. The XML-RPC endpoints were disabled last
year due to flooding. Our infrastructure could not cope with abusive
queries. You can read the log of events at https://status.python.org/

Christian


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