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Show HN: I made a search engine for Hacker News

hackernews.demo.vectara.com

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

#55

Post by flir »

8organicbits wrote: post #49
flir wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering if segmentation might be the way to go. Have the chatbot look at all the items, cluster them into a few buckets of its choosing, then throw each new item into the most appropriate bucket. (I've been thinking about this not just in terms of HN, but treating all my RSS feeds as one undifferentiated stream and just having a chatbot sort incoming items into whatever bucket it deems most appropriate).…

I've been thinking about that at length recently. RSS feeds often don't have category elements specified and there isn't a widely used taxonomy of category names. I'd prefer not to use AI to solve the problem, although encouraging the use of RSS categories will be slow work. https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/

Thanks for the link. It's interesting, and I hope you find a way forward with that, it would undoubtedly be a useful addition to the ecosystem.

But my gut feeling is that there's not enough interest in RSS right now to drive widespread adoption of a new version of the spec. My approach would be to focus on improved UX over existing feeds, rather than speculatively expanding the spec to make feeds richer.

The main advantage of my approach, I think, is that it adapts to the individual end user's needs. If all my subscribed feeds are tech-focused and I use a generic published taxonomy, I'm going to end up with 60% of my items in "Technology" and 30% in "Computing". If I use a chatbot to dynamically bucket stuff, I'll get "Micro PCs", "Graph theory", "Golang", etc etc.

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

#58

Post by sph »

ptsd_dalmatian wrote: post #57

Am I the only one that hasn't noticed the search input in the footer? :O

These days I use the search feature much more than commenting or reading posts. The frontpage is the usual recent news addiction treadmill, while for research into niche topics you can find a treasure trove of interesting comments in the archives.

Want more posts about Lisp, Smalltalk and reverse engineering, for example, rather than the usual front page drivel? Search for them.

On one hand I wish Algolia didn't give very old posts a lot of weight (it often prefers to show posts > 8+ years ago), on the other hand old content tends to be before the Eternal September of tech-adjacent people coming to this forum to discuss tech-adjacent light content, so it's actually a feature. The real value of HN is its archives IMO.

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

#60

Post by 8organicbits »

flir wrote: post #55
8organicbits wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about that at length recently. RSS feeds often don't have category elements specified and there isn't a widely used taxonomy of category names. I'd prefer not to use AI to solve the problem, although encouraging the use of RSS categories will be slow work. https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/

Thanks for the link. It's interesting, and I hope you find a way forward with that, it would undoubtedly be a useful addition to the ecosystem. But my gut feeling is that there's not enough interest in RSS right now to drive widespread adoption of a new version of the spec. My approach would be to focus on improved UX over existing feeds, rather than speculatively expanding the spec to make feeds richer. The main adv…

One nit, RSS categories have long been part of the spec, but I've found people don't add them consistently.
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