
Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? - jacquesm
Hello Paul,<p>What is the deal with search on HN?<p>There isn't a week or some new HN member posts a question about how to search HN, most of the time they are either confused about why there is no search on the site, in other cases they are trying to find some article and can't locate it.<p>The various fixes (google using the site: prefix and pointers to searchyc.com) have been repeated so often that I suspect some users have programmed function keys to save on the typing :)<p>I see that news.ycombinator.com promotes 'webmynd' as a search facility, however when compared to either google or searchyc it comes up short.<p>I appreciate you sticking up for the companies that YC funds, and of course this is your site and you can do with it as you please but what confuses me is that there seems to be no net benefit to webmynd from being listed on YC, whereas there is a significant loss for those that use news.ycombinator and that don't have an easy way to search the site. It makes news.ycombinator look less professional and it confuses people with some regularity.<p>Why won't you add a box that submits a google site search or a search on searchyc to HN?<p>Either that or ask the webmynd guys to get their act together and create something that is on par with searchyc, they seem to be able to get it to work, and for free and 'unfunded' no less.<p>If anything you could throw them a bone and show some appreciation for the work they've done supplying a missing feature at essentially no cost to HN. Or is there bad blood between news.ycombinator and searchyc that I'm not aware of?<p>Fred has indicated many times that he spoke to you about this, but so far I can't really make soup out of your position, after all, I take it that you want HN to be the best possible site for your users.
======
pg
The explanation is a lot less involved than your question: what makes users
happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So I
focus on the latter instead of the former. The result is a spartan site with
good content.

There's a YC funded startup that may solve the problem. If they do I'll use
them. But frankly the issue is not at the top of my list. This is a classic
example of how one should give users what they want, not what they say they
want. Lots of people _say_ they want search, but I would be suprised if there
was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. Whereas if I let the
frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean
or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly. So almost all
the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that.

~~~
johnrob
How about adding this to the header or footer?

<a
href="[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com>](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com>);
Search</a>

~~~
pg
Ok, I'll try it for a while. It really doesn't seem like it's worth adding a
link for something so trivial though.

~~~
Aegean
Any time I see something valuable on HN I quickly bookmark it so that I can
read it later on without the hassle to search it. Search is a hassle on YC. I
think we need a solution especially having been used to quick and effective
google search for almost anything.

~~~
jacquesm
That's what searchyc.com is all about.

Google is a good solution, searchyc.com is even better.

~~~
bootload
_"... searchyc.com is even better. ..."_

I'll second that. searchyc is my HN search of choice. Works every time. Why
are users complaining about finding things?

------
baddox
In all honesty, I have never even noticed that HN didn't have search. Coming
from reddit, I'm used to googling with "site:" and I've always done that with
HN as well. My point is that HN does not need search.

~~~
kevindication
I think you mostly want search when you decide to submit a link. Since you
don't want to submit a duplicate article, you have to check searchyc first.

~~~
jacquesm
I think it very much depends on how you use HN, if you use it just for the
consumption of 'news' then I can see why you would not need search as much,
but HN is much more than that.

It's an awesome resource, there are plenty of comments that are literally gems
when you're stuck on something or starting with some new tech and that's when
search comes in really handy.

For instance, how to start with clojure:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033503>

tell me how you'd ever find that without a search?

~~~
rabidgnat
Easily!

First, I'd stare at the Clojure webpage, and try some examples in the REPL.
I'd feel like I'm not grokking idiomatic Clojure, so I'd try some Google
searches, but find nothing compelling. I'd hit random Clojure links on Hacker
News and Reddit for a few weeks, but give up and move to a language with a
more active community.

A year later, I'd accidentally find it at the bottom of an unrelated post and
yell "If only I had that a year ago!"

------
10ren
Just on the general topic of site search, this is what I use on my site (names
changed):

    
    
        <form action="http://www.google.com/search" method="get">
          <input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="news.ycombinator.com">
          <input type="text" name="q" size="20">
          <input type="submit" value="search" name="submit">
       </form>

------
amirnathoo
From another thread, here's an explanation of what WebMynd actually does:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329398>

There is a misconception that it is somehow competitive or equivalent to
searchyc - it is not. And that the reason that searchyc is not linked to from
HN is because WebMynd is - that is not the case.

~~~
blasdel
And here's my snarkier version: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1194542>

~~~
jacquesm
> It's less useless than the 5 IE toolbars your annoying relatives live with,
> but just as obnoxious.

Ouch.

That's a funny bit of writing, but really, when you think about it the
searchyc guys deserve a round of applause for what they've built and that they
did it without being funded or any kind of profit motive makes it even more
impressive.

------
thiele
I just added a SearchYC plugin for the Firefox search box if anybody else
wants to use it: [http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-
engines.html?name=searchyc....](http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-
engines.html?name=searchyc.com)

------
furtivefelon
google: search term site:news.ycombinator.com, it's very good, and it could be
better than anything pg et al. can throw together in a hurry :D

~~~
jacquesm
From experience, it's not as good as a tailormade search like searchyc.com,
they store a lot of meta data about stuff on the site and that helps narrowing
down your searches considerably.

------
amund
PG: How about creating a competition for making the best search for
news.ycombinator.com?

Potential way it could be arranged: E.g. require that participants have their
yc name as part of the user agent string while crawling and that they are
allowed to maximum crawl 1000-10000 threads(with all comments) and create
search for that. Or perhaps create a recent dataset with stories/threads so
all participants have the same data.

Potential price for the winner: Serve search on news.ycombinator.com for one
year?

------
joubert
site:news.ycombinator.com on google?

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iamgabeaudick
A crude solution: Google "site:news.ycombinator.com QUERY-STRING".

------
joshuarr
If you make something, and it works really well, and lots of people love it,
and you own it, well, you can do whatever the hell you want with it. The
people who complain about this or that about it can shove off.

------
cianestro
I turned HN into a Fluid app. Problem solved here.

