HN Search Updated • Hacker News Board

Re: HN Search Updated

#41

Post by diziet » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 1:01 AM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #38

aabalkan wrote: post #29

Where is the "order by time" functionality. This is pretty much useless now for searching old stuff you recall. I still use Google "site:news.ycombinator.com keyword" query to search on HN as many of those homemade search engines are not handling synonyms and plurals etc well.

I mostly used the sort by date to find a recent (a few days, or last week) submission that I remember but it’s too deep to find in the normal page.

I'd found things from over a year ago with sort by date functionality (because of lack of good synonym matching and the fact that hn's url structure makes searching for comments less likely from an 'SEO' perspective)

Re: HN Search Updated

#42

Post by mindcrime » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 1:06 AM UTC

Sadly, I don't like this much at all. I don't see any way to filter by whether the searched for keyword appears in the title or in comments, or to sort by date, etc. This appears to be much less useful for the kinds of searches I do.

Re: HN Search Updated

#43

Post by louthy » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 1:16 AM UTC

Hopefully one day the default HN search will understand the # in C# or F# or the . in .NET

Re: HN Search Updated

#44

Post by look_lookatme » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 1:26 AM UTC

I use hnsearch quite a bit as a general search/opinion tool. I use it less as a gateway to HN and more as filtering tool (wherein I expect readable, non-italic versions of the comments on the result page). For instance if I was curious if Don DeLillo ever popped up in HN comments.

Compare the results:

https://hn.algolia.io/?q=Don%20Delillo https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Don+Delillo

Algolia's manages to find a result that hnsearch doesn't, but on the other hand all of the white noise surrounding each result and false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian, and frankly is difficult to visually parse.

The HN comments are useful body of knowledge if you use it the right way. Having a fast, easy to read search that lets you scan for the best comments on a subject is really handy. Focus on the text and readability because that's all that's important.

I also use Pinboard and Quora (and to some degree Reddit) for this kind of opinion/commentary based research.

Re: HN Search Updated

#45

Post by kibwen » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 2:25 AM UTC

As someone who uses hnsearch literally every day, this makes me a little concerned.

I'm active in the Rust community, and my usecase involves searching for the keyword "Rust" and sorting by date in order to figure out where the current discussions are happening. Without the capability to quickly zero-in on recent comments (especially given the lack of any automatic notification of comment replies), HN will be much diminished for me.

Are there plans to both begin indexing comments and to add a sort-by-date feature?

Re: HN Search Updated

#46

Post by jlemoine » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 2:40 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #45

As someone who uses hnsearch literally every day, this makes me a little concerned. I'm active in the Rust community, and my usecase involves searching for the keyword "Rust" and sorting by date in order to figure out where the current discussions are happening. Without the capability to quickly zero-in on recent comments (especially given the lack of any automatic notification of comment replies), HN will be much di…

The next iteration is planned for tomorrow, we are taking into account the maximum of feature request possible.

We will ask for new feedback after :)

Re: HN Search Updated

#47

Post by clamprecht » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 2:56 AM UTC

Can anyone comment on why Swiftype (a YC search-as-a-service) startup isn't providing search for HN? It seems like an obvious choice (although the Octopart-powered search seemed to work great).

Re: HN Search Updated

#48

Post by Ryel » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 3:47 AM UTC

That's fast

Re: HN Search Updated

#49

Post by dbaupp » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 3:54 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #45

As someone who uses hnsearch literally every day, this makes me a little concerned. I'm active in the Rust community, and my usecase involves searching for the keyword "Rust" and sorting by date in order to figure out where the current discussions are happening. Without the capability to quickly zero-in on recent comments (especially given the lack of any automatic notification of comment replies), HN will be much di…

What about: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Rust&sort... ?

Re: HN Search Updated

#50

Post by hnriot » Sat, Jan 25, 2014, 5:03 AM UTC

Relevancy is all wrong. I searched for spark and the top result is from two years ago. I want the most recent result first, like email. Relevancy should be a function of tf/idf, comment count and recency, biased towards the latter.

But the instant search and screenshot is good.