

Tell HN: HN Search isn't indexing anything newer than 5 days old - petercooper

Not much to say really but for all popular keywords I've just tried the newest item is 5 days old. And none of the current front page items seem to be visible either.<p>For example, there are posts about Ruby almost every day, but..<p>http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&#38;q=ruby&#38;sortby=create_ts+desc&#38;start=0
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andres
Sorry guys - one of the parsing scripts died and didn't get restarted
automatically. Normally we would have noticed the problem earlier but we've
been away at a conference this past week. The script is back up and the index
should be up-to-date within the hour.

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sherjilozair
I would also like to add that it only does exact string matching. HN could use
a better algorithm. The search could, say, even crawl the website linked. That
would make HNsearch a much more powerful search engine, its advantage being
the huge amount of vote data collected from an awesome community. Instead of
Google's back-link information, instead of Aardvark's social graph nearness
algorithm, HNsearch could be a search based in the level of intellect
contained in the links, and discussions. All it needs is some sophistication
in the algorithm, maybe some LSA, LCS, etc...

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andyjohnson0
I don't understand why hn needs its own search engine. What are the advantages
of using hnsearch compared to using google with 'site:news.ycombinator.com'?

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danso
...because Google doesn't offer site specific options such as sort by
date/points?

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pbhjpbhj
Google do offer sort by date but it doesn't work terribly well IME.

You could also do a rough number range search ("100..1000") that might help
capture higher value comments but in practice is probably too rough to be
useful.

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petercooper
This is probably a good time to give my thanks and appreciation to HN Search,
however. I use it a lot and it's a very useful tool. I appreciate whoever does
all the work on it.

Feel free to leave similar comments as it might give someone a smile while
they're being hassled to fix this over Thanksgiving.. ;-)

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pg
I asked the Octoparts.

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petercooper
Thanks, I did e-mail and tweet the @HNSearch account as well but thought it'd
probably do better here.. :-)

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przemoc
Maybe it mimics twitter in this behavior? What is now is the only relevant
stuff. Present doesn't see beyond 5 days time horizon.

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pooriaazimi
Well, actually it seems that HN search has taken the opposite approach ( _NOT_
indexing new items).

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petercooper
This has now been resolved! Thanks everyone involved :-)

