Ask HN: Why doesn't HN provide some categories or tags for easier search?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196320

by wanshao • 2 years ago

1 7 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a software engineer, so I'm only interested in certain topics related to development. However, HN is filled with posts of various types. The current search function is not quite sufficient when I need to find a specific type of topic.

skilled• 2 years ago

The site was never built with this functionality in mind.

Off the top of my head:

- visual clutter

- dev time and resources, maintenance

- moderation cost

Adding this feature now wouldn’t make much of a difference to your perceived issue because it would be impossible to tag historical submissions.

Lobste.rs does tags and there is decent overlap with HN submissions, so you might want to look into using that.

The current search function is not quite sufficient when I need to find a specific type of topic.

You have an example of this? Algolia supports searching through comments also.

wanshao3• 2 years ago

Examples of this are quite common. Many tech company blog pages offer tag-based searches. The articles published can be tagged either by the system or manually, allowing us to filter content we're interested in by searching for these tags.

coldtea• 2 years ago

Because that way madness lies.

First it starts with categories and tags (and maintaining a taxonomy?), then you need search, then start adding other stuff, ultimately you've remade something like Digg.

HN is simple and clean.

wanshao3• 2 years ago

That makes sense. Every choice has its pros and cons. Simplicity is the philosophy of HN. If complexity gets out of control, HN would cease to exist. However, perhaps some small experiments could be feasible while maintaining simplicity?

jrhey• 2 years ago

There are a good few web and mobile apps out there to help you filter through what you want to read.

I'm rebuilding my website over at https://dev.hazumi.news which will soon let you search and filter by categories assigned by AI, e.g. posts by tech news, programming, business, economics, etc.

The iOS version today already has keyword based push notifications (with pro subscription), so you can toggle on notifications for specific keywords like Ruby, Rust, Apple, Google, etc from a predefined list, that I can add to if you request it.

Here's the app if you're interested: https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/hazumi-news/id1670237209

wanshao3• 2 years ago

Thank you for sharing. However, I might be looking for more specific categorizations. For instance, if I'm only interested in AWS-related content, I would like to be able to search for the 'AWS' tag.

noashavit• 2 years ago

The entire concept is a clean crowdsourced feed of projects. When you start to introduce categorization and tag the UI gets busy and you lose focus of the main thing they want you to do- rate/comment.

This is also why the search bar is only at the bottom of the pages. And... Alogolia search is quite robust, so you should be able to find what you need with longtail search and the date/popularity filter.

Ask HN: Why doesn't HN provide some categories or tags for easier search?

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