How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=55739

by Readmore • 19 years ago

29 47 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Come on guys, this is getting stupid. This site has been up for over a year, it's popular, there are tons of new stories everyday, and we still can't search! What's going on?

nreece• 19 years ago

Your best bet for searching Hacker News for now is http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/ (an external util)

Readmore5• 19 years ago

Thanks. I knew I had seen a post about an external search tool but since I couldn't search the site I couldn't find it again. ;)

paulgb3• 19 years ago

ycsearch.com is not as fancy, but it is a bit easier to remember. Although, I guess it is just as easy to remember site:news.ycombinator.com, which it is functionally equivalent to.

bootload6• 19 years ago

but it doesn't pass the "artichoke" test ~ http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/search1/?q=artichoke

run4yourlives• 19 years ago

You're a hacker right? You should be building a search tool yourself! :-)

Kidding, but yes, I share your frustration.

ivankirigin2• 19 years ago

I wonder how easy it would be to make a firefox plugin that let you easily search the site of the tab you're in...

chmac• 19 years ago

Now that would be awesome. Even better if you could configure your own search engine. I use scroogle, but site:currentsite.com still works...

A quick hunt[1] didn't throw up anything for me... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=current+si...

joshwa• 19 years ago

google toolbar has a "search this site" button

Xichekolas• 19 years ago

I have one made, just trying to figure out how to share it.

I can't find anywhere on the Mozilla development site that just lets you upload the xml file. They want to make me fill out a form that builds the plugin for me. Problem is that their form isn't really powerful enough to actually make a decent plugin. What am I missing?

For now it has been uploaded to: http://www.lorebroker.com/ycombinator.xml

Just download and stick in your searchplugins directory (C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins in Windows) along with the other plugins you find there.

Goladus• 19 years ago

I could be wrong, but I don't think the site has been up quite a year yet...

Readmore5• 19 years ago

Yeah you might be right, it sure seems like it's been that long. I'm sure it was here in 06, 9 months is plenty of time to put in "select * where title like '%query%';"

pg2• 19 years ago

The site launched in Feb 07.

Doing search right is not just a matter of searching titles. And unless you're prepared to work hard to get it right, you're probably not going to do better than Google.

edu• 19 years ago

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com

pg2• 19 years ago

What's going on is that I have a few other things to do. Like writing essays and dealing with 58 (so far) startups we've invested in. Since the main advantage of implementing search would be to save people from going all the way to Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+Readmo...), it's not a huge priority.

ntoshev2• 19 years ago

You can easily put a search box executing in-site search in Google. This saves the users the context switch of going to Google.com.

axod2• 19 years ago

Google never spiders everything. I'd be really surprised if google had caught every single story that had been posted here.

axod2• 19 years ago

Why not open source and let hackers on here help ;)

Readmore5• 19 years ago

Beautiful comment!

steve• 19 years ago

brand dilution.

yters• 19 years ago

Someone has to make sure the hackers aren't hacking things up.

(Btw, how about a couple synonyms for 'hacker?')

Readmore5• 19 years ago

I don't doubt that you have many other things on your plate but surely there is someone at YC that could do this. Or if nothing else take axod's comment and open it up so that someone on here can do it for you.

Update - Make it part of the Winter YC application. Post the data we need to know and let people write the code for you.

paulgb3• 19 years ago

"Make it part of the Winter YC application. Post the data we need to know and let people write the code for you."

Are you just saying that because you want to see the Arc specifications? :P

SwellJoe• 19 years ago

"Make it part of the Winter YC application."

As a way to weed folks out, I guess? Automatic disqualification due to inability to focus on ones own problems?

bootload6• 19 years ago

"... but surely there is someone at YC that could do this ..."

the headcount is pretty low, who? My idea would be to open up the data, release it as RSS, ATOM or XML. Then you could search it yourself.

bootload6• 19 years ago

"... By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages ..." ~ http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow#Specification_2005...

Damn I just thought of one problem though. "Rel=nofollow" on low priority submissions means google will have low(er) priority search? Is that right?

tocomment• 19 years ago

I went ahead and created a Google Coop search here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=013284775634912373901%3Avm...

ntoshev2• 19 years ago

Use Google.

Search is hard to do if you hack all the code (no external search engine or a database).

andres• 19 years ago

Google has already indexed this page. Pretty impressive. One quick hack would be to put up a search box that redirects to a google search.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aycombinator....

dood• 19 years ago

Google seems to like news.yc. I week or two ago I did a search for something obscure without using site:news.yc, and it returned a post from this site that had been posted something like 48 minutes before my search.

paulgb3• 19 years ago

I remember a few instances of people submitting google searches as stories and within an hour the news.yc story was showing up in the results.

akkartik2• 19 years ago

The recent stuff is easy, but google seems to not do as well once pages aren't already accessible from the front page.

redrory• 19 years ago

I agree, a Search will be quite helpful

henning• 19 years ago

Thank you for confirming my belief that putting up with the JVM or the CLR is worth it because you get awesome libraries like Lucene, Nutch, and most other things you want but don't want to write yourself or come up with an unsatisfactory workaround for.

Yes there's Google, but Google lacks transparency and if something doesn't index they won't tell you and there's nothing you can do about it.

kashif• 19 years ago

With so many hackers here, why doesn't someone familiar with Lisp write a simple search module and send it to PG who can just check it for sanity and plug it in? I know its not easy to do without seeing PG's source code.

PG how about making news.yc open-source so we can all work on it?

How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search?

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