Ask HN: Building a search engine using the Hacker News archive

Hacker News has the most brilliant submitted links from all across the web. And they are also already indexed based on their popularity.

If I were to leave a search engine to index these links, then I would have a very useful vertical search engine for anything and everything that interests people like us.

I don't know how this is done, other wise would have done so.

Any ideas why this hasn't been done yet?