
Saying goodbye to Octopart-powered HNSearch - andres
HN’s search functionality is now powered by Algolia (YC W14) instead of Octopart (YC W07).<p>While it’s sad to say goodbye to something we built with love, I for one welcome a new player with the energy and motivation to build a search engine that does HN justice.<p>When we launched HNSearch it was because we wanted to show the world what we could do with our search infrastructure. We had built a powerful search database (ThriftDB) and we were eager to see how far we could take it. Unfortunately, we never had the time to focus on improving HNSearch or on getting users for ThriftDB so it’s time to sunset those products.[1]<p>In terms of Octopart on the other hand, the future has never looked brighter. We followed our own path and and now we’ve assembled an outstanding team that’s passionate about opening up access to part data for a new generation of hardware hackers.[2] Our proprietary search infrastructure is still one of the best we’ve seen and we have some ambitious plans for how to make it even better.<p>HN, thanks for the memories. We are very proud to have powered search for such an incredible community.<p>Andres<p>[1] We’ll continue to support hnsearch.com until March 15 to give developers time to migrate their apps to Algolia’s API (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.io&#x2F;api).<p>[2] Octopart is hiring. Come join us!!!! (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;octopart.com&#x2F;jobs)
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uladzislau
Does anyone else agree that the site thumbnails in the new search just
distract from the search results without adding any value?

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redox_
What do you think about
[http://hn.algolia.com/legacy](http://hn.algolia.com/legacy) ?

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cinquemb
Thanks for this. But I would like to add that it seems like I cannot[0] do an
exact phrase search like I could do with HN search[1]. It seems to search for
a body of text that contains all the words rather than the exact phrase,
unless there is some special syntax I am not familiar with to do the same.

[0]:
[http://hn.algolia.com/legacy#!/comment/sort_by_date/0/%22Sta...](http://hn.algolia.com/legacy#!/comment/sort_by_date/0/%22Stand%20Alone%20Complex%22)

[1]:
[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=%22Stand+...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=%22Stand+Alone+Complex%22&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

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klapinat0r
> _Unfortunately, we never had the time to [...] getting users for ThriftDB_

Which is surprising to me as I've waited for _years_ to try it, but it always
stated it was unavailable.

I would've loved to try it.

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flocial
Is there any reason why you can't hand over hnsearch.com?

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avalaunch
Will sort by points functionality be added? Please... pretty please.

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staunch
The mass of knowledge stored in the HN archives is considerable and HNSearch
has been a great way to mine it. Thank you!

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macrotim
Is there a way to sort by points? I see only a radio button to "Sort by date."

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frik
Thank you for providing the search.

Sorry, but the search results and the stylesheet are way better for me with
the old hnsearch.com

I will use a Google search like this: "site:news.ycombinator.com FooBar"

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wib
I use the !hn bang syntax on DuckDuckGo daily… Here's hoping it stays
available.

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ereckers
I was wondering about the technology you used to fetch the site thumbnails?

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redox_
We use wkhtmltoimage, more details available here:
[http://blog.algolia.com/hacker-news-search-
algolia](http://blog.algolia.com/hacker-news-search-algolia)

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ereckers
Just getting back around to this. Wanted to say thanks for the writeup.

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DanBC
I very much liked your HN search. I could find things.

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GrahamsNumber
I'm sorry to say, but at least right now the new search is absolutely
dreadful. Try searching for "Go".

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redox_
We've just deployed an improvement disabling prefixed search when the query
comes from the news.ycombinator.com or after form submitting (press enter).
What do you think?

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GrahamsNumber
Better, but you need to stop ranking by points and switch to a relevance
metric. There are two main issues right now: A lost of the posts are really
old, and the results are plain bad. Here's some results I get when I search
for "Go" again:

1\. Reddit to go dark on Jan 18 to protest SOPA 2\. Go Daddy No Longer
Supports SOPA 3\. Why we can't go back to business as usual post-PRISM 4\.
Right click and save as needs to go away

and so on. You could for example, instead of just maching a single keyword,
look at the post contents and comments, and see if that keyword appears
multiple times. A discussion about Golang is bound to have more entries of
"Go" than "Go Daddy no longer supports SOPA".

