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Comment by noelchurchill | Hacker News Reader

why not block all search engines?

Because News.YC doesn't have it's own search engine. So I use google to search the site.

Why not solve the real problem and set up a search engine for News.YC? This has other advantages such as controlling what shows up in the results, different ways to sort them, etc.

It's easy to do with open-source software such as Solr (lucene.apache.org/solr) or Hounder (hounder.org, shameless plug because it is our product), which powers the wordpress.com site.

Edit: it looks like someone already did this: searchyc.com.

You must be new here.

The day PG & Co adopt some piece of software that is made in Java... well, I can't even finish the sentence.

Part of the & Co is Paul Buchheit, who wrote some of the news.yc javascript. Paul Buchheit's company friendfeed is using lucene for search.

i didn't know that.

Either way, I think that PG is the king of guy who would rather work on his very special design (staying in Arc-land as long as possible) than adopting systems where you no longer have control.

Letting Paul work on the JavaScript makes sense, in this case. PG has no control over client-side code, so he prefers to not bother with it.

Google uses Java, and since that is evidentally the only acceptable search engine, I'm not sure pg's posited elitism really goes that far.

I didn't say that PG would refuse to use any system that was developed in Java. What I meant that he would never would put himself in a situation where the application would depend on Java for development, or to add more features.

To integrate with Google, you talk HTTP, not Java. To adopt Lucene, you'll have to talk Java. There is quite some difference, isn't it?

You can push everything you want indexed into SOLR by HTTP -- so even though it's Java/Lucene you don't have to get your hands dirty.

They use some Java, but a whole lot more Python and C++...

Usualy Google gets better results that a custom search engine for your site, because Google also knows the links form other web pages to your site.

Did you not find searchyc.com useful?

Googling for my name lists my Hacker News profile as one of the top results. I think that is really cool.

That is cool. My username returns my profile here as the number one hit. I had no idea it would score so highly.

Not as cool as mine. My username returns a wikipedia page about some asteroid. Cool stuff.

googling my username brings up my hacker profile too

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+y...

There's no other search.

> There's no other search.

http://www.searchyc.com

(edit: I'm not the one who voted you down)

and

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/

They stopped indexing looong ago.

thanks, I didn't know that! Perhaps they should say so on the page...

Done :)

Hey can you publish the source code of the search tool?

wow, that was quick:-)

Does that actually work for people? I've tried using Google to search News.YC for an older topic on a couple of occasions, and the results have been very hit-or-miss. Is it just me?

(plug)

If you remember some key words from the title, you can do a quick find in http://www.kirubakaran.com/phr0zen (snapshots of front page). It is not really search search but I find it useful all the time.

right on. then implement a search feature

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