site:news.ycombinator.com on google?
Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about adding this to the header or footer? http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com> ; Search
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.
Would be great if you shared the number of hits to that url after about a month or so.
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#93The 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…
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Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#94The 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…
>The result is a spartan site with good content.
Umm, yah, content that users constantly gripe they cannot access (search) easily
it's 2010, search on a link aggregation site is, imo, fundamental, not "crap"
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#95The 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…
To which YC funded startup are you reffering?
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's an opportunity cost for every feature added, and it's not just the time lost in implementation. More features = more code, which means more things you have to consider each time you add the next feature. More features = more interface complexity, which means additional things that your users have to consider each time they use the site. More complexity also tends to scare off new users. And more features = more bugs, which is a further drain on productivity in the future.
Didn't we just have this thread yesterday when Google introduced a few new features that everyone seems to hate? ("Changing crap", I believe PG called them.)
Besides, the argument isn't that you shouldn't add features unless the lack of the feature would lose users. It's that you should be careful which features you add so that you can spend your limited resources on the features that truly delight your users. Big companies usually aren't mediocre because they're complacent (well, perhaps except GM). They become mediocre because their userbase is broad enough that every feature they introduce will piss someone off, so they end up with collections of features such that any given person will love 10% of the product and loathe the remaining 90%.
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 conce…
Does it really take more time to type "site:news.ycombinator.com my query" into the OmniBar than it does to find a text box on the page and type "my query" into it?
I've used search 100s of times as well to find a comment or article that I previously read, but I just Google it. I don't see how having a dedicated search box would be any faster. (And if he used Lucene or a custom algorithm instead of offloading things to Google, it'd probably be significantly worse.)
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#98Earlier 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…
I'd be careful about messing with points on comments (and with karma more generally). You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimulation that the current karma system provides, but I doubt such a thing could exist; if it did, it would probably be much less exciting than HN. Smart people who enjoy good discuss…
LambdaTheUltimate? No points there, and it's resisted the influx of trolls better than most.
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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://new…
Re: Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?
#100The 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…
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.
I'm afraid that is an excuse; it's a solved problem (almost) because of the users and editors.
Search is also a solved problem: link/form submission to Searchyc - done. :)
(but I get the feeling you have something against searchyc - it always gets ignored despite being a great resource)