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Ask HN: How do I search through pages linked from HN?
Most of the posts here on HN are links to pages on other web sites. How do I find pages featuring particular words among these?
E.g. I'd like to find an article on digital signal and processing which probably had the words like "signal" and "filter" in its text but all I can remember about the title used on HN is that it probably didn't feature either.
- caryd 7y agoYou'd have to use a crawler or make a basic one to curl and grep
- qwerty456127 7y agoIt's just hard to believe nobody has made one yet.
- microtonic1 7y agowell I started to build one with proxycrawl some months ago but I got busy and couldn't finish it. I should publish the source on github so others can finish it
- 29athrowaway 7y agoPut this in Google, and see how it goes: signal filter "http://" site:news.ycombinator.com You will need some variations, like including "https://" https://", but this is a good start.
- qwerty456127 7y agoDoesn't this only search through titles and commentaries? What I am looking for is NOT under the news.ycombinator.com domain. For example lets open the main page, there is a "Microplastics found in 93% of bottled water tested in global study" title on it. Click on it and you'll get to the https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/bottled-water-microplastics-1.4575045 https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/bottled-water-microplasti... page. Within the article text it mentions "major national brands across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas". In this example I would like to search for "Africa" (which is not mentioned in the commentaries) and find this article as one of articles posted on HN and mentioning Africa.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoThe search feature on HN offers custom options for a variety of metrics. One tactic I use is to search on words in some comment I left in the discussion. If I search on my HN name, words I probably don't use overly much and check comments, I can frequently find it. Sometimes, fiddling with the time frame helps. If I have some hand wavy idea of when I read it and not enough other info, I will resort to playing with that element of the search engine. It's tedious, but sometimes results in successfully finding what I was looking for.
- qwerty456127 7y agoI have not commented anything that time. And I can't remember if it was 3 or much more months ago. I'll get too much of irrelevant comments if I search for "signal" or "filter" in comments on HN.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoThen let me suggest as an alternative you give a description here of what you recall and see if you can get lucky and have someone go "That sounds like this link".
- qwerty456127 7y agoIt described some signal processing/filtering science I've never heard of before :-) I've always wished HN had tags...