4 ms·
Ask HN: Am I using it wrongly or is HN's search engine bad?
This is not a rant rather than a serious question if I a) use the tool the wrong way or b) in case not, if it's possible to change it.
Yesterday I searched for an article I read 2 or 3 days ago (this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007856). I was 70% sure that the words "home" and "network" appeared in the post, so I searched in "Stories" in "Past Week" for these keywords and didn't find it.
I had to switch to "All" and noticed that the search engine didn't take the word "networking" into account which appeared in the title. I would argue that stemming and searching for root words is a basic feature of a modern search engine, if I type "site:news.ycombinator.com home network" into Google, I find the article without any problems.
So to sum up: What is the intention behind the way the search engine works? If I would type in "home network" in a full-text search engine, even that would give me the correct article but for some reason HN's search engine is not capable of that.
- mardiyah 5y agoonce i did so too guess it's simply just rather good SE not on the top class (google, amazon, yandex, bing etc)
- webmobdev 5y agoHN's search is not that great. For those who don't know about this, you can tell search engines like Google or Yandex to search for your keyword only on a particular website with the search filter site:www.example.com followed by the search term. (E.g site:news.ycombinator.com home network ).
- yamrzou 5y agoIt's the first result when I search "Stories" in "Past Week", sorted by Popularity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=true&query=home%20network&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... Is it not the case for you?
- simonkafan 5y agoNot for "home network": https://ibb.co/59yFDT5 https://ibb.co/59yFDT5
- simonkafan 5y agoAh I see it now: "prefix=true" is the property that apparently includes "networking" when searched for "network"
- draw_down 5y ago