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Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

hackernews.demo.vectara.com

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Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#1
I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments.

Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.

Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News
hackernews.demo.vectara.com

Re: Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#3
Cool project, but I'm struggling to understand what is better about the Vectara solution?

Compared to Algolia.hn, this gives 0 filter controls (time window, stories vs. comments, `author:metadat', sort order, and so on), and no ability to search for exact matches. It failed to turn up anything interesting or even relevant for the 4 or 5 queries I ran.

You've still made it further than I in the HN search engine adventures, which is commendable.

Re: Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#4
post #3

Cool project, but I'm struggling to understand what is better about the Vectara solution? Compared to Algolia.hn, this gives 0 filter controls (time window, stories vs. comments, `author:metadat', sort order, and so on), and no ability to search for exact matches. It failed to turn up anything interesting or even relevant for the 4 or 5 queries I ran. You've still made it further than I in the HN search engine advent…

If it's searching article content as well as just titles/comments, that's already quite interesting and useful. I've long wanted something like that for my browser history, like a "help me find this article I know I read sometime last week about X."

Re: Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#5
post #3

Cool project, but I'm struggling to understand what is better about the Vectara solution? Compared to Algolia.hn, this gives 0 filter controls (time window, stories vs. comments, `author:metadat', sort order, and so on), and no ability to search for exact matches. It failed to turn up anything interesting or even relevant for the 4 or 5 queries I ran. You've still made it further than I in the HN search engine advent…

If it's searching article content as well as just titles/comments, that's already quite interesting and useful. I've long wanted something like that for my browser history, like a "help me find this article I know I read sometime last week about X."

Yes, I've only recently rediscovered using the browser history for this exact purpose and it hasn't failed me yet.

It would be remarkable and interesting to have a super deep search capability that indexes all first-order links on this site.

Re: Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's searching article content as well as just titles/comments, that's already quite interesting and useful. I've long wanted something like that for my browser history, like a "help me find this article I know I read sometime last week about X."

Yes, I've only recently rediscovered using the browser history for this exact purpose and it hasn't failed me yet. It would be remarkable and interesting to have a super deep search capability that indexes all first-order links on this site.

browser history seems to only save the last 3 months of history. It used to be many years of data but that also slowed the browser down.

Re: Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's searching article content as well as just titles/comments, that's already quite interesting and useful. I've long wanted something like that for my browser history, like a "help me find this article I know I read sometime last week about X."

Yes, I've only recently rediscovered using the browser history for this exact purpose and it hasn't failed me yet. It would be remarkable and interesting to have a super deep search capability that indexes all first-order links on this site.

And you think that hasn't been made yet? :-D

Show HN: DeepHN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26791582

Of note, I was able to find that item (which I recalled existed but not by what name) with hn.algolia, but I was not able to find it with the OP search engine, or with the DeepHN search itself. So in my book, Algolia is winning.

But projects like this are super fun and educational to build so props to OP.

Re: Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#9
post #3

Cool project, but I'm struggling to understand what is better about the Vectara solution? Compared to Algolia.hn, this gives 0 filter controls (time window, stories vs. comments, `author:metadat', sort order, and so on), and no ability to search for exact matches. It failed to turn up anything interesting or even relevant for the 4 or 5 queries I ran. You've still made it further than I in the HN search engine advent…

If it's searching article content as well as just titles/comments, that's already quite interesting and useful. I've long wanted something like that for my browser history, like a "help me find this article I know I read sometime last week about X."

Ditto. I somewhat recently learned that Safari only keeps the history log for one year unless you explicitly set "Remove history items" to "manually." Which I've done so that I at least have a list that I could crawl in the future to build a full text index on.

Re: Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

#10
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've only recently rediscovered using the browser history for this exact purpose and it hasn't failed me yet. It would be remarkable and interesting to have a super deep search capability that indexes all first-order links on this site.

And you think that hasn't been made yet? :-D Show HN: DeepHN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26791582 Of note, I was able to find that item (which I recalled existed but not by what name) with hn.algolia, but I was not able to find it with the OP search engine, or with the DeepHN search itself. So in my book, Algolia is winning. But projects like this are super fun and educational to build so props to OP.

OP said they only indexed the past 6 months.
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