

How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? - Readmore

Come on guys, this is getting stupid. This site has been up for over a year, it's popular, there are tons of new stories everyday, and we still can't search! What's going on?
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pg
What's going on is that I have a few other things to do. Like writing essays
and dealing with 58 (so far) startups we've invested in. Since the main
advantage of implementing search would be to save people from going _all the
way to Google_
([http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+Readmo...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+Readmore)),
it's not a huge priority.

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axod
Why not open source and let hackers on here help ;)

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steve
brand dilution.

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henning
Thank you for confirming my belief that putting up with the JVM or the CLR is
worth it because you get awesome libraries like Lucene, Nutch, and most other
things you want but don't want to write yourself or come up with an
unsatisfactory workaround for.

Yes there's Google, but Google lacks transparency and if something doesn't
index they won't tell you and there's nothing you can do about it.

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nreece
Your best bet for searching Hacker News for now is
<http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/> (an external util)

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Readmore
Thanks. I knew I had seen a post about an external search tool but since I
couldn't search the site I couldn't find it again. ;)

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paulgb
ycsearch.com is not as fancy, but it is a bit easier to remember. Although, I
guess it is just as easy to remember site:news.ycombinator.com, which it is
functionally equivalent to.

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edu
<http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com>

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run4yourlives
You're a hacker right? You should be building a search tool yourself! :-)

Kidding, but yes, I share your frustration.

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ivankirigin
I wonder how easy it would be to make a firefox plugin that let you easily
search the site of the tab you're in...

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Xichekolas
I have one made, just trying to figure out how to share it.

I can't find anywhere on the Mozilla development site that just lets you
upload the xml file. They want to make me fill out a form that builds the
plugin for me. Problem is that their form isn't really powerful enough to
actually make a decent plugin. What am I missing?

For now it has been uploaded to: <http://www.lorebroker.com/ycombinator.xml>

Just download and stick in your searchplugins directory (C:\Program
Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins in Windows) along with the other plugins
you find there.

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cosmok
I have created a plugin, that can be used for searching ycombinator.It is
available here: <http://trk7.com/yc>, on just needs to click on it to install
in FF and IE7.

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tocomment
I went ahead and created a Google Coop search here:

[http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=013284775634912373901%3Avm...](http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=013284775634912373901%3Avm_-
vlwn1zu)

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andres
Google has already indexed this page. Pretty impressive. One quick hack would
be to put up a search box that redirects to a google search.

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aycombinator....](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22How+is+it+that+%27Hacker+News%27+still+doesn%27t+have+search%3F%3F%22&btnG=Search)

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dood
Google seems to like news.yc. I week or two ago I did a search for something
obscure _without_ using site:news.yc, and it returned a post from this site
that had been posted something like 48 minutes before my search.

~~~
paulgb
I remember a few instances of people submitting google searches as stories and
within an hour the news.yc story was showing up in the results.

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kashif
With so many hackers here, why doesn't someone familiar with Lisp write a
simple search module and send it to PG who can just check it for sanity and
plug it in? I know its not easy to do without seeing PG's source code.

PG how about making news.yc open-source so we can all work on it?

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ntoshev
Use Google.

Search is hard to do if you hack all the code (no external search engine or a
database).

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Goladus
I could be wrong, but I don't think the site has been up quite a year yet...

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Readmore
Yeah you might be right, it sure seems like it's been that long. I'm sure it
was here in 06, 9 months is plenty of time to put in "select * where title
like '%query%';"

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pg
The site launched in Feb 07.

Doing search right is not just a matter of searching titles. And unless you're
prepared to work hard to get it right, you're probably not going to do better
than Google.

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paul
Adding a sitemap might help Google index the old pages better. Adding date-
based archive links (like many blogs do) would probably help as well (making
the site structure more like a tree and less like a list).

[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.htm...](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html)

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redrory
I agree, a Search will be quite helpful

