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Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

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Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#61

Post by jacquesm »

derefr wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> painkillers and vitamins. I can't make heads or tails of this comment. Could you please explain?

I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.…

I could have sworn that it was posted in a wrong thread, but your explanation makes me doubt.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#62

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #61
derefr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.…

I could have sworn that it was posted in a wrong thread, but your explanation makes me doubt.

[deleted]

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#63

Post by bbuffone »

pg wrote: post #2

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 shoul…

Good content is exactly why hacker news needs search. There is a ton of info that would be useful to people after one day. Which is about as long as it stays on the homepage. If content is your number one priority giving people a search box would create more good content.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#64

Post by Herring »

johnrob wrote: post #9
pg wrote: post #2

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 shoul…

How about adding this to the header or footer? http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com&#62 ; Search

For convenience, maybe that link should be http://www.google.com/search?&domains=news.ycombinator.c...

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#65

Post by pg »

credo wrote: post #30
pg wrote: post #2

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 shoul…

>> I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. While I agree with you, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. No user will leave HN because of search-issues, but a lot of users will be very happy if the site had good search. imo it makes sense to do a trivial thing and make a lot of users happy. So while you're correct in saying that "quality of the submissions and comm…

I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature.

Because attention is a finite resource. I can only spend attention on minor problems by taking it away from major ones.

For example, right now, instead of wasting my time replying to this comment, I should be working on a new project we're launching soon. And I think I will, so forgive me if I drop out of this thread.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#66

Post by ericd »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #39
pg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend ti…

Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still…

Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy.

Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content.

You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#67

Post by jacquesm »

Herring wrote: post #64
johnrob wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about adding this to the header or footer? http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com&#62 ; Search

For convenience, maybe that link should be http://www.google.com/search?&domains=news.ycombinator.c...

For convenience it should be a box with a button posting to searchyc.com, it's much better at searching HN than google. But something is better than nothing.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#68

Post by jacquesm »

ericd wrote: post #66
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still…

Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make…

The argument PG brought was that it would take time away from the other work. But as it is it incrementally takes time away from all of us, and all the time.

The spending of that one or two minutes at integrating searchyc.com or google.com would come back 1000 fold over the life time of the site, and probably much more than 1000 fold, and if he's that busy he maybe should pass the torch to people that can fully concentrate on making HN, the best site of its kind right now even better.

I personally find it very hard to believe that the trade-off is as stark as is portrayed here, working on a site like this is not in 'absolutes' like that, you simply do stuff because it has to be done. If a YC funded start-up would display that attitude to their users they wouldn't stand much a chance, in fact it is exactly opposite to what Paul says in other places to how one should deal with users.

It seems more like a stubborn 'I'll do this my way' kind of thing, Paul has kept the door solidly locked to others contributing to HN, but then goes and makes a big case about how he has only so much time to spend. It's hard to be arguing both of those at the same time.

Anecdotally, I've used search 100's of times to find a comment or an article that I'm pretty sure I read on HN but at the time didn't have an application for so I didn't bookmark it. This happens all too often in the tech sector, after all you can't know in advance which technology will land on your plate 3 months from now.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#69

Post by aneth »

pg wrote: post #65
credo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. While I agree with you, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. No user will leave HN because of search-issues, but a lot of users will be very happy if the site had good search. imo it makes sense to do a trivial thing and make a lot of users happy. So while you're correct in saying that "quality of the submissions and comm…

I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature. Because attention is a finite resource. I can only spend attention on minor problems by taking it away from major ones. For example, right now, instead of wasting my time replying to this comment, I should be working on a new project we're launching soon. And I think I will, so forgive me if I drop out of this thread.

This is the craigslist logic. Sticky sites can convince themselves they can do no wrong because really they can't. Users would need a really strong reason to leave in droves (friendster). Even spam comments would not lose users quickly unless they were overwhelming because hacker news has a critical mass of people who would have an impossible time moving en masse.

Just because people still use craigslist doesn't mean they are doing it right. A decent mapping ui and post reply management would make the site so much better, users happy, and destroy the competition. Instead Craig says basically what you say here. It's the complacent mediocrity of monopoly.

No offense. I don't even care about search. But I disagree that you shouldn't add features unless the lack of the feature would lose users. You should add features that make users happy.

Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

#70

Post by 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?

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