Programmer-friendly search engine?

Try http://www.symbolhound.com .

This seems to solve your problem. SymbolHound is a search engine that doesn't ignore symbols or special characters in web queries like google does. It's not a source code search, either. Hope that helps!

Cannot help you, but can at least provide you with a vision (maybe same startup will go an realize it).

Assieme is the research prototype of a dedicated search engines for software documentation. The idea is that searching software documentation is a specialized task, that needs specialized search engines. For example, when searching for APi documentation the engine should also extract valid examples from eg blog posts and show them to us. Et cetera.

For the full paper, please refer to: "Assieme, Finding and Leveraging Implicit References in a Web Search Interface for Programmers"

PS: If you are interest in the latest research on software search, you may take a look at the SUITE workshop series. We're also on twitter :)

Have you tried Yahoo BOSS? It's a search API which is currently free (requires sign-up), through which you can use Yahoo's web search. If you escape all relevant characters as described in the FAQ, you can search for arbitrary verbatim strings.