5 ms·

The explanation is a lot less involved than your question: what makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So I focus

by pg 17y ago

The explanation is a lot less involved than your question: what makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So I focus on the latter instead of the former. The result is a spartan site with good content. There's a YC funded startup that may solve the problem. If they do I'll use them. But frankly the issue is not at the top of my list. This is a classic example of how one should give users what they want, not what they say they want. Lots of people say they want search, but I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. Whereas if I let the frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly. So almost all the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that.

jacquesm 17y ago
Shall we put it to a vote ?
- pg 17y ago
  Even if people said they'd prefer I focused on adding features like search rather than the quality of submissions and comments, which is unlikely, I still wouldn't.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    I find it hard to believe that a programmer of your caliber would make it seem as though an off-site submission is such a big deal that it would take away significant time from working on the quality of the submissions and comments. I'm not 1% the programmer that you are and it wouldn't take me more than 15 minutes to put a search box (after all, it's just a piece of static text) in the HN footer. See, all those 'quality submissions and comments' are pretty much useless if you can't find them, what's the use of having this amazing body of content if there is no easy way to peruse it? The content goes by so quick now that if you look the other way for three days that you'll have missed tons of good stuff, an easy way to search would make all of HN accessible, not just what is current right now.
    - pg 17y ago
      What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend time thinking about the kind of problem I should be thinking about. One of the big questions I've been mulling over is what to do about points on comments. I'm increasingly inclined not to display them, because an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very inarticulate comment. And this subthread is an argument for doing so, because the only reason I felt obliged to respond to you is the number of points your comment got. If points weren't displayed I wouldn't have felt I had to respond. Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        Found using searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 (google doesn't work well when you search for words in the UI of HN)
      - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
        Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still trying to learn as much as I can from you, but why the hell do you think here that Jacques is giving you a bad requirement for your site? You sound pompous and disconnected. EDIT: And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN? That sounded crazy, but I just heard it via email. The internet is crazy. Can't be true.
        ericd 17y ago
        Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy. Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content. You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.
  - matt1 17y ago
    Make something people want, right? If the majority of folks here want search, and given that it wouldn't take much time to add a link to SearchYC, why not do it?
    - pg 17y ago
      The reason I wouldn't add a link to SearchYC is the same that I don't add a link to one of the HN iPhone apps: I don't know the authors or the app well enough to anoint it as official. I don't mind if people want to build stuff on top of HN, but I have a much higher threshold for making something part of HN.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        Searchyc is at least as reliable if not more reliable than HN, I think you'd be in pretty good hands there. In all the time that I've been using it I think I've seen it down only twice, HN over the same period numerous times.
        chengmi 17y ago
        HN handles considerably more traffic than SearchYC.
        jacquesm 17y ago
        Well, that's a difficult one: Either PG is right and nobody needs search, then we'll find it doesn't matter, or I'm right and we do need search and then the searchyc guys will need to beef up their system. But then at least we do know for sure we need that search.
        chengmi 17y ago
        As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - matt1 17y ago
    As with most threads, posting an intelligent opinion will probably have a greater impact than a simple down vote.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Now why would you do that? If you agree with the need for a search then you could say why, maybe there is a use case that is good enough for Paul to cross that line and make it happen, this is not a popularity contest, it simply gets me that such a basic and much needed feature is missing and I feel that if Paul practices what he preaches that he should have implemented it long ago. HN is not a democracy, the 'shall we put it to a vote' was an attempt at showing how many people really do want this, if Paul does not wish to know or if he would ignore the outcome anyway that's his right, but it would be nice to see some consistency in the reasoning about why there is no search.
    - akkartik 17y ago
      I guess I thought you really wanted a vote. It just seemed like the simplest way to hack it. It seems pointless to say why: the reasons are obvious, and stating them is not getting you anywhere. Why is a whole bunch of people showing that they want search not a compelling 'why'? Even if popularity contests aren't the best decision, the results of a vote in a small community seems like a reasonable signal to want. 'Why would I do that?' Jeez, why does downvoting cause such a kneejerk reaction? Even if karma means something - which it does not! - PG has plenty of it if anybody does. I was just trying to help you. I wasn't really thinking about search before you posted, and now I'll go back to doing that. Whatever.. Update: deleted baiting to downvote which is apparently also bad form according to the guidelines.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        A vote would have been fine with me, but PG is well within his rights as the owner of the site to ignore the outcome. To ask people to downvote or upvote others is really bad form here.
wwortiz 17y ago
I think the real thing is that many people would just like a more convenient way to search this site, I've become accustomed to using searchyc but no one really knows that exists until someone points it out. Even if it is just a link that says Search that points to a custom google search it is far more convenient than the point that it is at now. To be honest a custom google search isn't really a complicated feature, but if you believe that this site does not need a search feature anywhere I'll respect that and continue to use searchyc just threads about how to search will continue to appear.
johnrob 17y ago
How about adding this to the header or footer? <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com&#62 http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com> Search</a>
- pg 17y ago
  Ok, I'll try it for a while. It really doesn't seem like it's worth adding a link for something so trivial though.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Thanks! that was quick!
  - matt1 17y ago
    If it was trivial, there wouldn't be so many questions about how to search the site :) But thanks. Edit: Or maybe if you're the type of person who can't figure it out, you're not the type of person who should be posting on HackerNews in the first place?
    - daeken 17y ago
      Anyone that has content that's interesting to hackers is "the type of person who should be posting on HackerNews". I love this community (and hacking in general) in large part because it's not filled with that sort of elitism; anyone who's able to contribute in a positive way is welcome.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aegean 17y ago
    Any time I see something valuable on HN I quickly bookmark it so that I can read it later on without the hassle to search it. Search is a hassle on YC. I think we need a solution especially having been used to quick and effective google search for almost anything.
credo 17y ago
>> I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. While I agree with you, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. No user will leave HN because of search-issues, but a lot of users will be very happy if the site had good search. imo it makes sense to do a trivial thing and make a lot of users happy. So while you're correct in saying that "quality of the submissions and comments" are more important, I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature.
- aaronbrethorst 17y ago
  painkillers and vitamins.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > painkillers and vitamins. I can't make heads or tails of this comment. Could you please explain?
    - derefr 17y ago
      I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.) EDIT: Oh, wait, I screwed that up completely. It's from here: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-your-start.html http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-... Apparently, painkillers are the good things. Goes to show how weak analogies won't actually carry your message.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        I could have sworn that it was posted in a wrong thread, but your explanation makes me doubt.
kimfuh 17y ago
I like not having a search option. It keeps me learning things at random. It keeps the site simple and constantly fresh.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Do you use the web the same way ?
  - carbocation 17y ago
    When on the web, I pretend to be a Markov chain that has some nonzero chance of stopping at each step.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
bbuffone 17y ago
Good content is exactly why hacker news needs search. There is a ton of info that would be useful to people after one day. Which is about as long as it stays on the homepage. If content is your number one priority giving people a search box would create more good content.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
chimingin 17y ago
>The result is a spartan site with good content. Umm, yah, content that users constantly gripe they cannot access (search) easily it's 2010, search on a link aggregation site is, imo, fundamental, not "crap"
shushan 17y ago
To which YC funded startup are you reffering?
ErrantX 17y ago
Whereas if I let the frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly. So almost all the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that. I'm afraid that is an excuse; it's a solved problem (almost) because of the users and editors. Search is also a solved problem: link/form submission to Searchyc - done. :) (but I get the feeling you have something against searchyc - it always gets ignored despite being a great resource)

by pg 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Shall we put it to a vote ?

pg 17y ago
Even if people said they'd prefer I focused on adding features like search rather than the quality of submissions and comments, which is unlikely, I still wouldn't.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I find it hard to believe that a programmer of your caliber would make it seem as though an off-site submission is such a big deal that it would take away significant time from working on the quality of the submissions and comments. I'm not 1% the programmer that you are and it wouldn't take me more than 15 minutes to put a search box (after all, it's just a piece of static text) in the HN footer. See, all those 'quality submissions and comments' are pretty much useless if you can't find them, what's the use of having this amazing body of content if there is no easy way to peruse it? The content goes by so quick now that if you look the other way for three days that you'll have missed tons of good stuff, an easy way to search would make all of HN accessible, not just what is current right now.
  - pg 17y ago
    What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend time thinking about the kind of problem I should be thinking about. One of the big questions I've been mulling over is what to do about points on comments. I'm increasingly inclined not to display them, because an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very inarticulate comment. And this subthread is an argument for doing so, because the only reason I felt obliged to respond to you is the number of points your comment got. If points weren't displayed I wouldn't have felt I had to respond. Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Found using searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 (google doesn't work well when you search for words in the UI of HN)
    - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
      Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still trying to learn as much as I can from you, but why the hell do you think here that Jacques is giving you a bad requirement for your site? You sound pompous and disconnected. EDIT: And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN? That sounded crazy, but I just heard it via email. The internet is crazy. Can't be true.
      - ericd 17y ago
        Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy. Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content. You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.
- matt1 17y ago
  Make something people want, right? If the majority of folks here want search, and given that it wouldn't take much time to add a link to SearchYC, why not do it?
  - pg 17y ago
    The reason I wouldn't add a link to SearchYC is the same that I don't add a link to one of the HN iPhone apps: I don't know the authors or the app well enough to anoint it as official. I don't mind if people want to build stuff on top of HN, but I have a much higher threshold for making something part of HN.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Searchyc is at least as reliable if not more reliable than HN, I think you'd be in pretty good hands there. In all the time that I've been using it I think I've seen it down only twice, HN over the same period numerous times.
      - chengmi 17y ago
        HN handles considerably more traffic than SearchYC.
        jacquesm 17y ago
        Well, that's a difficult one: Either PG is right and nobody needs search, then we'll find it doesn't matter, or I'm right and we do need search and then the searchyc guys will need to beef up their system. But then at least we do know for sure we need that search.
        chengmi 17y ago
        As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- matt1 17y ago
  As with most threads, posting an intelligent opinion will probably have a greater impact than a simple down vote.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Now why would you do that? If you agree with the need for a search then you could say why, maybe there is a use case that is good enough for Paul to cross that line and make it happen, this is not a popularity contest, it simply gets me that such a basic and much needed feature is missing and I feel that if Paul practices what he preaches that he should have implemented it long ago. HN is not a democracy, the 'shall we put it to a vote' was an attempt at showing how many people really do want this, if Paul does not wish to know or if he would ignore the outcome anyway that's his right, but it would be nice to see some consistency in the reasoning about why there is no search.
  - akkartik 17y ago
    I guess I thought you really wanted a vote. It just seemed like the simplest way to hack it. It seems pointless to say why: the reasons are obvious, and stating them is not getting you anywhere. Why is a whole bunch of people showing that they want search not a compelling 'why'? Even if popularity contests aren't the best decision, the results of a vote in a small community seems like a reasonable signal to want. 'Why would I do that?' Jeez, why does downvoting cause such a kneejerk reaction? Even if karma means something - which it does not! - PG has plenty of it if anybody does. I was just trying to help you. I wasn't really thinking about search before you posted, and now I'll go back to doing that. Whatever.. Update: deleted baiting to downvote which is apparently also bad form according to the guidelines.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      A vote would have been fine with me, but PG is well within his rights as the owner of the site to ignore the outcome. To ask people to downvote or upvote others is really bad form here.

wwortiz 17y ago

I think the real thing is that many people would just like a more convenient way to search this site, I've become accustomed to using searchyc but no one really knows that exists until someone points it out. Even if it is just a link that says Search that points to a custom google search it is far more convenient than the point that it is at now. To be honest a custom google search isn't really a complicated feature, but if you believe that this site does not need a search feature anywhere I'll respect that and continue to use searchyc just threads about how to search will continue to appear.

johnrob 17y ago

How about adding this to the header or footer? <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com&#62 http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com> Search</a>

pg 17y ago
Ok, I'll try it for a while. It really doesn't seem like it's worth adding a link for something so trivial though.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Thanks! that was quick!
- matt1 17y ago
  If it was trivial, there wouldn't be so many questions about how to search the site :) But thanks. Edit: Or maybe if you're the type of person who can't figure it out, you're not the type of person who should be posting on HackerNews in the first place?
  - daeken 17y ago
    Anyone that has content that's interesting to hackers is "the type of person who should be posting on HackerNews". I love this community (and hacking in general) in large part because it's not filled with that sort of elitism; anyone who's able to contribute in a positive way is welcome.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Aegean 17y ago
  Any time I see something valuable on HN I quickly bookmark it so that I can read it later on without the hassle to search it. Search is a hassle on YC. I think we need a solution especially having been used to quick and effective google search for almost anything.

credo 17y ago

>> I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. While I agree with you, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. No user will leave HN because of search-issues, but a lot of users will be very happy if the site had good search. imo it makes sense to do a trivial thing and make a lot of users happy. So while you're correct in saying that "quality of the submissions and comments" are more important, I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature.

aaronbrethorst 17y ago
painkillers and vitamins.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > painkillers and vitamins. I can't make heads or tails of this comment. Could you please explain?
  - derefr 17y ago
    I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.) EDIT: Oh, wait, I screwed that up completely. It's from here: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-your-start.html http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-... Apparently, painkillers are the good things. Goes to show how weak analogies won't actually carry your message.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      I could have sworn that it was posted in a wrong thread, but your explanation makes me doubt.

kimfuh 17y ago

I like not having a search option. It keeps me learning things at random. It keeps the site simple and constantly fresh.

jacquesm 17y ago
Do you use the web the same way ?
- carbocation 17y ago
  When on the web, I pretend to be a Markov chain that has some nonzero chance of stopping at each step.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

bbuffone 17y ago

Good content is exactly why hacker news needs search. There is a ton of info that would be useful to people after one day. Which is about as long as it stays on the homepage. If content is your number one priority giving people a search box would create more good content.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

chimingin 17y ago

>The result is a spartan site with good content. Umm, yah, content that users constantly gripe they cannot access (search) easily it's 2010, search on a link aggregation site is, imo, fundamental, not "crap"

shushan 17y ago

To which YC funded startup are you reffering?

ErrantX 17y ago

Whereas if I let the frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly. So almost all the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that. I'm afraid that is an excuse; it's a solved problem (almost) because of the users and editors. Search is also a solved problem: link/form submission to Searchyc - done. :) (but I get the feeling you have something against searchyc - it always gets ignored despite being a great resource)