Are there any paper-finding search providers that focus on technical questions and recent indexed material?

Yes — there are a few search tools that are especially good when you want to ask a technical question and get recent, indexed papers rather than generic web results.

Good options

• Semantic Scholar

  • Strong for technical and scientific literature.
  • Good paper indexing, citations, and related-paper discovery.
  • Often better than general search for finding relevant academic work quickly.

• Elicit

  • Designed for research questions, especially literature discovery and summarization.
  • Helpful when you want to explore a technical question across papers.
  • More “research assistant” than pure search engine.

• Consensus

  • Targets question answering from research papers.
  • Useful for finding evidence-backed answers to technical/scientific questions.
  • Best when you want “what do papers say?” rather than just a list of papers.

• Google Scholar

  • Broad and familiar.
  • Good coverage, including recent papers, though it’s less tailored to interactive technical Q&A.
  • Powerful when combined with keyword searching and citation chaining.

• Connected Papers

  • More for mapping a paper’s neighborhood than answering a question directly.
  • Excellent for finding recent related work once you have one seed paper.

• Perplexity with academic/web modes or source-grounded search tools

  • Not a paper database itself, but can surface recent sources and synthesize answers.
  • Quality depends on whether it’s actually grounded in scholarly sources.

If your priority is “technical question + recent indexed material”

The best fits are usually:

1. Semantic Scholar
2. Elicit
3. Consensus
4. Google Scholar for breadth

Quick recommendation

• For finding papers fast: Semantic Scholar or Google Scholar
• For asking a technical research question: Elicit or Consensus
• For exploring related literature around a known paper: Connected Papers

If you want, I can also give you:

• a comparison table
• tools focused specifically on recent preprints
• or recommendations for ML / CS / medicine / engineering separately.