Ask HN: Ways to search Hacker News?

I was just tweeting about how I would like recommendations for academic papers to read, and thought it would certainly have been a previous topic here at HN [1]. The problem was actually finding it.

Then it hit me. There's no real way to browse Hacker News archives. Hacker News is a great resource for entrepreneurs and people with a curious brain - every day there's brilliant insight inside these posts. Insight that will certainly be lost if ways to index/browse/search the archives aren't implemented. Google isn't a big help here either, because it doesn't index content based on relevance (which could theoretically be internally extracted from post attention data and votes).

I'm quite sure I'm not the only one missing this piece of "functionality", and I'd like to see a discussion around finding old topics. How could a HN archive be implemented? Would there be interest?

[1] - Turns out it really was a topic, for the curious: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059478