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I would also like to add that it only does exact string matching. HN could use a better algorithm. The search could, say, even crawl the website linked. That wo

I would also like to add that it only does exact string matching. HN could use a better algorithm. The search could, say, even crawl the website linked. That would make HNsearch a much more powerful search engine, its advantage being the huge amount of vote data collected from an awesome community. Instead of Google's back-link information, instead of Aardvark's social graph nearness algorithm, HNsearch could be a search based in the level of intellect contained in the links, and discussions. All it needs is some sophistication in the algorithm, maybe some LSA, LCS, etc...

andyjohnson0 14y ago
I don't understand why hn needs its own search engine. What are the advantages of using hnsearch compared to using google with 'site:news.ycombinator.com'?
- danso 14y ago
  ...because Google doesn't offer site specific options such as sort by date/points?
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Google do offer sort by date but it doesn't work terribly well IME. You could also do a rough number range search ("100..1000") that might help capture higher value comments but in practice is probably too rough to be useful.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Reasons might range from the aesthetic: the "search language" of the Google Search Engine is imperative, not functional; to the paranoid: Google might datamine searches from YC company IP addresses; to the utterly practical (and perhaps likely): a toy search engine is a good way to know enough about search engines to guide and evaluate a YC company working in that area. Then again, it may just scratch an itch as an inhouse tool.
- sherjilozair 14y ago
  Google would only search the discussion threads, and not the content on the website. What I'm pushing for, is we can easily extract a 'credible' subset of the web and only search that web. That subset is the set of links that HNers have posted to HN, sorted in priority by the number of votes they have returned. Also, as danso mentioned, HNsearch could use some function of points and date, to rank the results.

andyjohnson0 14y ago

I don't understand why hn needs its own search engine. What are the advantages of using hnsearch compared to using google with 'site:news.ycombinator.com'?

danso 14y ago
...because Google doesn't offer site specific options such as sort by date/points?
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Google do offer sort by date but it doesn't work terribly well IME. You could also do a rough number range search ("100..1000") that might help capture higher value comments but in practice is probably too rough to be useful.
brudgers 14y ago
Reasons might range from the aesthetic: the "search language" of the Google Search Engine is imperative, not functional; to the paranoid: Google might datamine searches from YC company IP addresses; to the utterly practical (and perhaps likely): a toy search engine is a good way to know enough about search engines to guide and evaluate a YC company working in that area. Then again, it may just scratch an itch as an inhouse tool.
sherjilozair 14y ago
Google would only search the discussion threads, and not the content on the website. What I'm pushing for, is we can easily extract a 'credible' subset of the web and only search that web. That subset is the set of links that HNers have posted to HN, sorted in priority by the number of votes they have returned. Also, as danso mentioned, HNsearch could use some function of points and date, to rank the results.