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

Re:Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? by pg on Saturday May 08, 2010 @01:48PM (#1330577)

I had already added a link to Google site search. See the footer.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329380

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? by jules on Saturday May 08, 2010 @04:29PM (#1330869)

That's not very useful. It takes less time to just go to Google and type it there.

- searchyc usually returns better results

- a search box is much more useful than a link

- it should be in the header, or at least not in a place that nobody ever looks at

But by now it's obvious that that's not going to happen.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? by pg on Saturday May 08, 2010 @05:09PM (#1330929)

But it's what users asked for. How could that be wrong?

(See how complicated such matters actually are? Nothing that goes on the front page of the site is ever a trivial matter.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? by jacquesm on Saturday May 08, 2010 @06:22PM (#1331037)

The link is an improvement over nothing, at a minimum it will cut down on the number of newbies posting 'how do I search' questions, at least, if they scan the footer.

Experience shows that this is probably not the case but then at least we can point them to the link without having to explain site prefixes, which is still a net gain.

If it were in the header (which is pretty crowded) it would be more useful, but I can see that that might lead to complications, if it were a miniature form in the header it would be better still, but I can see that that would really be much harder to integrate.

Searchyc.com probably can't handle the load if they are the 'sole provider of search' for HN, so it looks like that is not an option, when the HN robots.txt file locked out google because you had to crunch the numbers for the applications it was apparently touch-and-go on searchyc.

Now I'm really curious what your secret startup is that may solve the problem, and I hope they roll out soon.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? by rooshdi on Sunday May 09, 2010 @01:07AM (#1331573)

I am currently part of a start-up, Favetop.com, which offers direct site searching through just the click of a site icon. I've found it to be quite convenient for searching sites directly and much better than constantly adding site prefixes or visiting the actual websites to search. You may want to give it a try and see if it helps you out.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? by J3L2404 on Saturday May 08, 2010 @10:07PM (#1331363)

I haven't been here very long but I have never seen a post by PG with no upvotes. This thread has two - something is amiss.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN? by EliAndrewC on Monday May 10, 2010 @01:38PM (#1335276)

Here's one where PG was actually downvoted into oblivion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190451

[ Parent | on HN ]