
Hacker News Instant Search - binomial
http://instantise.com/#hackernews
======
Derferman
While the new crop of "Instance [website] Search" projects are cool, I feel
like most are missing the key feature of Google Instant: predictions. Without
predictions, the user never knows what search returned the current results.
Instead of instant search, these examples feel like instant filtering.

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binomial
The YouTube Instant implementation did have predictions, though I believe it
was just a hack using Google's own API.

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rradu
How about you collaborate with <http://searchyc.com> and use their index with
this interface?

~~~
jackowayed
I'd love that. They'd need to significantly speed Search YC up for that to
work though. A search that doesn't require hitting enter but takes 5 seconds
to give results isn't very satisfying.

I really love Search YC, but it's _so_ slow. I wonder if we could do some kind
of kickstarter campaign to get them better infrastructure (assuming better
infrastructure would fix it without significant code optimizations). Or maybe
someone could donate servers? Maybe lsc, since he runs a hosting company,
though his margins are probably fairly low even without giving away hosting.

And even if it needs optimizations, if they OSSed it, I bet HN users could
make that happen too.

~~~
what
It is slow sometimes, but their query logs would be useful for query
suggestions. Query suggestions should be based on what searches are popular.
Not sure if you want to go through the effort of making suggestions yourself
though.

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Qz
No offense, but I'm slightly tired of Instant Search Blog'o'News!, etc.
headlines.

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mike-cardwell
Rather than wiping the results and re-inserting the new ones after each
character is added it would look better if individual results were pulled out
and inserted in the correct location. Some times the results don't change
between key presses yet there is still a momentary flash where they're removed
and re-added.

It would also be nice if it degraded gracefully for non-js browsers. Like
Google search does.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Also, you should try to force the browser vertical scroll bar to be on
permanently. When typing using Firefox just now the scrollbar kept appearing
and disappearing which made the position of various on screen elements jump
from side to side as the viewport size changed.

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riffer
This is awesome. I love seeing what people can build in a short period of
time, and you know that this was just a couple of days.

Good job, Tam.

~~~
TamDenholm
6 Hours actually. :P Thanks for the kind words.

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AlexMuir
This is the best one yet - I can actually see myself using this. It's hard to
know what terms people have used on HN when searching for something. The Ask
HN archives are a brilliant resource.

~~~
tommynazareth
I like the idea to, but querying searchyc.com for 'ask hn' ends up being much
more effective. The concept is great, and I'm sure the execution will keep
improving.

The thing I'm most impressed with is the awesome domain name.

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amichail
It doesn't have predictions.

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TamDenholm
I'll be fixing that soon. Should be in within 24 hours.

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oleg_myrk
Can I ask where did You get information on all HN submissions? Did You just
scrape the web site for all IDs from 0 to 1683584 or so?

~~~
abless
Have a look at the source code. He just uses Google search.

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nrbafna
Nice. But, check that some results are repeated. For example, when searching
for "android ", <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1506909> and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332153> are listed twice.

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bad_user
I don't like how the results are refreshed ... it should load the results in a
hidden div or something, then swap, and it should put a delta between
refreshes ... I would have a second elapsed between 2 result sets displayed.

The indexer doesn't do a very good job, e.g. I searched for "mono" and only 4
results have been shown. Here's the Google index:
<http://www.google.ro/search?q=mono+site:news.ycombinator.com>

Also, the address bar should be refreshed with the query searched because the
URI has to be a permalink.

Otherwise, it's awesome.

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TamDenholm
Hey guys, author here, thanks all for the kind words. It's nice to see it
reaching the front page of HN when someone with decent karma submits it.

Just to let you all know I've only spent about 6 hours on this and plan to
polish it up somewhat as it's still quite rough. I've also got a bunch of
other developers requesting inclusion into the site swell, which I'll also
add.

Things on the todo list are visual polish, adding other services, new menu,
adding the suggest feature, perhaps changing from just using the google search
to better apis etc.

Thanks for the feedback.

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jlees
Next step, grab a corpus of HN posts and do some text crunching to generate
suggestions.

(or you could 'borrow' Feross' code, which is not condoned by Google - posts
on the Interwebs say Google Suggest's "API" is not for public use - and not
specific to this domain.)

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tobyvanzanten
Hi. I took two scripts and combined wich give fill-in words and to get direct
results (still just 5) on the page with google instant. What do you guys think
of the results? url = www.googled.eu

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TamDenholm
<http://bit.ly/ddUj1E> <\-- if anyone finds analytics interesting, HN moved
WAY more traffic than TC. A good section of the directs are HN too.

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mikecane
My hat is off to you. It works in Opera and now I can get a glimpse of what
Google Instant -- and other Instants that don't play nice with Opera -- is
like. Thanks.

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Brajeshwar
Can you please do a body {height: 100%; margin-bottom: 1px;}

~~~
TamDenholm
I tried this out on a test page, couldnt see a difference, whats it supposed
to fix?

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cmelbye
Cute idea, but it doesn't have predictions and the results are quite bad.
Typing in "NoSQL" doesn't come up with the recent Heroku blog post about
NoSQL.

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sahillavingia
A new meme? Surprised that it took Google to do it before it got applied to
several other sites.

Seems that Google is still pretty darn innovative and forward-thinking.

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opskode
My first impression before clicking the link was that this was using
searchyc.com 's index.

I guess its based on a search-engine result after all.

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shaunxcode
you should adjust it so searching for "lisp" does not end up with a chunk of
code w/ multiple li tags in it as being more relevant than articles that
actually have the word "lisp" in them. I noticed this with a few other phrases
too such as "vegan" - there are multiple "vega" chip comments that take
precedence over the fully matched word.

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siddhant
Love it. Replacing the google search for HN (the search hyperlink at the
bottom of this page), with this one would be nice.

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vijaydev
awesome! I liked the nice and clean UI. Even if the coder himself says it is
ugly in his about page :)

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LiveTheDream
How come when I click on "reddit" in the top bar of Instantise, it takes me to
Google in an iframe?

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TamDenholm
Hey guys just added a bunch more services from other developers. Thanks to
all.

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stevederico
this is an amazing tool thank you. I would appreciate the presentation of the
post date in the results page if possible. Thanks for your hard work.

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Keyframe
I get only 4 results for node.js

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AlisdairO
You get only 4 results for everything - i think that's the limit.

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joshfinnie
Good call. I thought it was broken only getting 4 results for python. I think
this should be clearly stated somewhere on the webpage.

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Concours
this is amazing, the best search tool for HN. Very helpful.

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abalashov
So, does the author now get a handsome six-figure job offer from Y Combinator
via Twitter?

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jacquesm
Unlikely. I know you're trying to make a joke but I'd see YC point him to one
of their start-ups long before they'd hire him themselves.

And start-ups generally do not offer six figure salaries.

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TamDenholm
And i dont use twitter. :P

~~~
jacquesm
Good for you :)

