

How I hacked HN Search at the fHACKtory hackathon last weekend - redox_
http://fhacktory-hnsearch.herokuapp.com

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

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hobs
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!

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

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redox_
Nice post, I'll release the rails4-based source code before the end of the
week. Hopefully with a blog post explaining the underlying ranking algorithm.

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jared314
This looks like it is just crawling HN, and using Algolia to provide a search
over that data. What exactly are you hacking?

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redox_
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.

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jared314
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](https://www.hnsearch.com/api)

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

"meteor" only brings back 2 results.

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redox_
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 ;)

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

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

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maximesalomon
Good stuff !

