How I hacked HN Search at the fHACKtory hackathon last weekend

http://fhacktory-hnsearch.herokuapp.com

by redox_ • 13 years ago

21 13 13 years ago

fhacktory-hnsearch.herokuapp.com

I was expecting an article explaining how the search engine was built.

hobs• 13 years ago

Same, searching HN is no "hack" unless it was done in a novel or interesting way. This might even be a cool hack, but I dont know!

wslh• 13 years ago

I hacked HNSearch in the formal way in this article: http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-and-execution-magic-chart/ python code is also here: https://gist.github.com/srw/1360455

Basically I could search beyond the HNSearch limits. The article is from 2011 so I don't know if it's working now.

redox_4• 13 years ago

I'll write a blog post about it in a few days. Thx for the feedback

maximesalomon• 13 years ago

Good stuff !

jared3142• 13 years ago

This looks like it is just crawling HN, and using Algolia to provide a search over that data. What exactly are you hacking?

redox_4• 13 years ago

If by "hack" you mean "break/exploit/...", I totally agree. But hackatons are more codefests, calling "hack" every piece of code written in a short amount of time. That's only my 4-hours project implementing a custom crawler, work-arounding black-listing, and indexing it with Algolia. BTW, I'll write a blog post explaining the underlying ranking algorithm, which is the real point.

jared3142• 13 years ago

It looks like it's only a couple of days of data. Are you crawling the pages directly or using the existing api [1]?

[1] https://www.hnsearch.com/api

ProAm2• 13 years ago

I search for "fracking" and only get back "tracking", "hacking" and "f__king" as results

"meteor" only brings back 2 results.

redox_4• 13 years ago

Since the crawl started 3 days ago only, assuming that I fetch only the first 10 pages, lots of terms are not yet in the indexed corpus. But querying "fracking", you can at least see the typo-tolerant instant search in action ;)

ProAm2• 13 years ago

Ahh, makes sense. I thought you had 'primed' the results database with history first.

olive_• 13 years ago

Why does not "Ask HN" return results while "Show HN" does?

How I hacked HN Search at the fHACKtory hackathon last weekend

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