HNSearch – old HN search engine – will be shut down later today
Any reason why the old domain couldn't continue to be a wrapper around the new engine/interface? hnsearch.com sounds more trustworthy to me (and has been around a lot longer) than algolia. (This is coming from a long-time lurker, never been into the YC scene much, so I've never heard of algolia).
I'm generally happy with the new search. It's faster.
One nit: IIRC, the old engine supported vanity searches - you could search author:-patio11 to find comments mentioning patio11 not written by patio11.
The new search doesn't appear to present any filtering or sorting options, at least on mobile. This surely can't be right. The old HNSearch with its quick toggles for submission/comment and date/points was extremely effective.
I wish the Algolia HN Search had a better coverage of older submissions and replies. Finding stuff that's older than 3 years is pretty hard on the new search.
Shame, it was way better than the new one.
Can someone outline the benefits of the new one over the old one? When I first tried the new one, the UI was severely lacking. I saw the fixed a few things, but I haven't evaluated it again.
I don't always use the HN search engine, but when I do, it's usually very helpful. I'd hate to lose that.
This sucks. The new search engine doesn't have the "sort by" feature. It also doesn't support "AND", and "OR", which is really disappointing.
Only a minor inconvenience, but now I have to use several separate bookmarks to search for every keyword I am interested in.
Also, I'm curious why Swiftype (a YC company) isn't powering HN's search. Anyone care to comment?
The search results for stories show both the long (and useless) news.ycombinator URL and a link to the comments. Both links lead to the same location. The news.ycombinator URL displayed is redundant and adds visual noise. I've highlighted both links in the image linked to below.
I'd like it if the results showed "link", "parent", and "on $News_Story", like the old site did.
I've have had the Algolia link bookmarked for a while now, I really love what these guys are doing, and the search results are just out of this world.
I hope the new search engine will eventually get the same index as the old one
I was searching for some articles where the old search would get me lots of results that the new search would not return. So I'm hoping that's an indexing issue rather than a quality of the new search engine issue
I rarely use the search function of Hacker News, but at a quick glance, the new search does look better.
Good:
1. The number of points and age of the stories are highlighted.
2. Thumbnails are a nice addition.
3. It looks less cluttered than the old search.
Bad:
1. Very dull font color for most things except the story title.
2. I had to enable two new domains in NoScript :P
HNSearch let you search users' "about" sections. How would one search users' profiles on the new search engine?
I had an app that used the json output from HNSearch. Are you guys going to enable that?
This "old HN search engine" was in use until relatively recently, right?
And http://skimhn.com which hasn't been updating in awhile will be even more not working.
Can the old engine be open sourced at least so it can be implemented in the new version? A lot of the syntax is missing in the Algolio thing.
Where do you get the entire HN database from?
undefined
How do you sort by points in the new one?
can you guys reuse the same domain name? algolia is blocked from our company :P
Anyone have a mirror?