How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search?

Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by pg on Monday September 17, 2007 @01:26PM (#55784)

What's going on is that I have a few other things to do. Like writing essays and dealing with 58 (so far) startups we've invested in. Since the main advantage of implementing search would be to save people from going all the way to Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+Readmo...), it's not a huge priority.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by ntoshev on Monday September 17, 2007 @01:56PM (#55804)

You can easily put a search box executing in-site search in Google. This saves the users the context switch of going to Google.com.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by axod on Monday September 17, 2007 @02:31PM (#55829)

Google never spiders everything. I'd be really surprised if google had caught every single story that had been posted here.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by jey on Monday September 17, 2007 @03:10PM (#55846)

I know I have had trouble finding things I've seen on news.yc when using Google.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by nailer on Monday September 17, 2007 @07:35PM (#55953)

An example: I'm running a startup from Melbourne Australia and read an interesting comment from someone in the same boat, including details of a meetup type event, a week ago.

I didn't bookmark it because I didn't expect it would be hard to find. But now I can't find it at all.

The poster mentioned Melbourne was the 'artichoke end of the world'. Googling for 'artichoke' on news.yccombinator.com has no results. How frequently does Google spider most sites anyway?

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by bootload on Monday September 17, 2007 @11:21PM (#56088)

"... The poster mentioned Melbourne was the 'artichoke end of the world'. Googling for 'artichoke' on news.yccombinator.com has no results. How frequently does Google spider most sites anyway? ..."

Yeah the search here sucks. My attempt at finding stuff is to

A) save it on my blog so I have the original copy I can then search via google

B) in FOX: site: http://news.ycombinator.com search+term

Look one way to get around it is for someone to spider the site and link back (damn I lost the link .... someone has a search site where???), another is to get a google box for what USD$5K and integrate google search. As the site grows, search is becoming important for historical articles, phrases or people who you want to ascribe a comment. Guess this is what's meant by users loving new features. I'm just glad there is somewhere for stuff like this to be discussed. So while search sucks, it's not integral, for me at least.

And by the way the word "Artichoke" is a vegetable reference from Wallace & Grommit, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_%26_Gromit:_The_Curse_o...

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by dane on Monday September 17, 2007 @08:24PM (#55968)

Meetup: http://twitter.com/mtub

bootload's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52955

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by rms on Monday September 17, 2007 @07:07PM (#55947)

I had problems finding stories from before the switch to putting all comments and news stories on item?id=x, because a search would go to a broken link. But the object numbers stayed the same, so if you find a story with a broken link, you can just switch comment?id=x to item?id=x.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by bootload on Monday September 17, 2007 @11:30PM (#56090)

"... I had problems finding stories from before the switch to putting all comments and news stories on item?id=x, because a search would go to a broken link. ..."

Deleted node probably. Means it's been deleted or removed by user and/or was probably edited because it was "spammish" or poor quality in nature.

"... so if you find a story with a broken link, you can just switch comment?id=x to item?id=x. ..."

This one I noted after some changes in the code probably about 2 months after I started using it. I save all my posts and the links started breaking (link checking). The term was changed from 'comment' to 'item' (guessing) because it was shorter.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by rms on Monday September 17, 2007 @11:40PM (#56092)

Before the update, items were broken down into 'comment' and 'link' (not sure if link was the object, it might have been news) but their ID numbers didn't overlap so I assume PG combined them because their was no reason not to, except for breaking old links.

The links I was trying to find weren't actually deleted, I just wasn't finding them because I only recently figured out I need to change the link to 'item?id='

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by bootload on Monday September 17, 2007 @11:48PM (#56096)

"... tems were broken down into 'comment' and 'link' (not sure if link was the object, it might have been news) but their ID numbers didn't overlap so I assume PG combined them because their was no reason not to, except for breaking old links. ..."

Thanks for that explanation. Hadn't taken the time to work this out.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by akkartik on Monday September 17, 2007 @10:55PM (#56072)

Seconded.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by axod on Monday September 17, 2007 @02:30PM (#55828)

Why not open source and let hackers on here help ;)

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by steve on Monday September 17, 2007 @08:12PM (#55965)

brand dilution.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by yters on Tuesday September 18, 2007 @02:03PM (#56415)

Someone has to make sure the hackers aren't hacking things up.

(Btw, how about a couple synonyms for 'hacker?')

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by Readmore on Monday September 17, 2007 @04:32PM (#55891)

Beautiful comment!

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by bootload on Monday September 17, 2007 @11:42PM (#56093)

"... By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages ..." ~ http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow#Specification_2005...

Damn I just thought of one problem though. "Rel=nofollow" on low priority submissions means google will have low(er) priority search? Is that right?

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by Readmore on Monday September 17, 2007 @04:33PM (#55892)

I don't doubt that you have many other things on your plate but surely there is someone at YC that could do this. Or if nothing else take axod's comment and open it up so that someone on here can do it for you.

Update - Make it part of the Winter YC application. Post the data we need to know and let people write the code for you.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by SwellJoe on Monday September 17, 2007 @07:00PM (#55942)

"Make it part of the Winter YC application."

As a way to weed folks out, I guess? Automatic disqualification due to inability to focus on ones own problems?

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by bootload on Tuesday September 18, 2007 @01:27AM (#56127)

"... but surely there is someone at YC that could do this ..."

the headcount is pretty low, who? My idea would be to open up the data, release it as RSS, ATOM or XML. Then you could search it yourself.

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by paulgb on Monday September 17, 2007 @05:01PM (#55898)

"Make it part of the Winter YC application. Post the data we need to know and let people write the code for you."

Are you just saying that because you want to see the Arc specifications? :P

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Re:How is it that 'Hacker News' still doesn't have search? by Readmore on Monday September 17, 2007 @05:56PM (#55916)

Hahah... no but that's a good idea. Shhhhhhush! ;)

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