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I use hnsearch quite a bit as a general search/opinion tool. I use it less as a gateway to HN and more as filtering tool (wherein I expect readable, non-italic

I use hnsearch quite a bit as a general search/opinion tool. I use it less as a gateway to HN and more as filtering tool (wherein I expect readable, non-italic versions of the comments on the result page). For instance if I was curious if Don DeLillo ever popped up in HN comments. Compare the results: https://hn.algolia.io/?q=Don%20Delillo https://hn.algolia.io/?q=Don%20Delillo https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Don+Delillo https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Don+Delillo Algolia's manages to find a result that hnsearch doesn't, but on the other hand all of the white noise surrounding each result and false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian, and frankly is difficult to visually parse. The HN comments are useful body of knowledge if you use it the right way. Having a fast, easy to read search that lets you scan for the best comments on a subject is really handy. Focus on the text and readability because that's all that's important. I also use Pinboard and Quora (and to some degree Reddit) for this kind of opinion/commentary based research.

nkurz 13y ago
false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian Those aren't false positives, those are additional helpful results in case you accidentally typed "Don Delillo" instead of "Delicious don't" or "dealloc done". I know I do that all the time! Unhelpful sarcasm aside, it's nice that the results that contain the actual search are at least above the non-results. But I really don't like trend of search engines to include results that don't include any of the search terms above results that contain some of them. If you search for just "Delillo", you'll come up with a lot of results that are probably relevant to the user's intention. Offering "If you didn't find what you were looking, maybe you meant:" alternatives could be helpful, but if not hidden (preferable), at the least these results should be clearly delineated from the actual matches. Google's approach of showing certain terms with a strike-through is the minimum I'd accept happily. edit: Yuck, when I wrote this I hadn't even realized that it keeps loading non-relevant results in an endless scroll.

nkurz 13y ago

false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian Those aren't false positives, those are additional helpful results in case you accidentally typed "Don Delillo" instead of "Delicious don't" or "dealloc done". I know I do that all the time! Unhelpful sarcasm aside, it's nice that the results that contain the actual search are at least above the non-results. But I really don't like trend of search engines to include results that don't include any of the search terms above results that contain some of them. If you search for just "Delillo", you'll come up with a lot of results that are probably relevant to the user's intention. Offering "If you didn't find what you were looking, maybe you meant:" alternatives could be helpful, but if not hidden (preferable), at the least these results should be clearly delineated from the actual matches. Google's approach of showing certain terms with a strike-through is the minimum I'd accept happily. edit: Yuck, when I wrote this I hadn't even realized that it keeps loading non-relevant results in an endless scroll.