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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I like it -- very useful.

A few questions:

* Why only blogs? I'd love to use it on other types of sites. (For example, maybe a wiki.)

* I like the keyboard support. (Search, hit down, press enter.) However, I'd like to be able to hit Esc to return to the list -- without using my mouse. It's pretty standard for Esc to close modal windows.

* When I click to see an entry full-screen, I'd rather it just open in the current window rather than a pop-up.

* If you don't mind, I'd love to hear a little about the backend. Is it Lucene?

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* We said we'll start out with blogs, because that's where we miss such a feature dearly. In the long run, anything which contains plenty of text could be "metahinted".

* Very useful suggestion, thank you. It is implemented now: ESC should close the popup window.

* Few commenters have suggested that. Would you prefer to see the entry occupy the entire screen or fit in a text-area of some sorts?. Anyways, reworking the preview functionality is on our TODO list.

* We'd respectfully defer answering this question in ample details to an upcoming blog post. We appreciate your understanding in this matter. To give you a short answer, however: no, it's not Lucene.

Thank you for your comment!

Hi,

* blogs have a well-defined format, they are relatively easy to crawl and they are wide-spread. Certainly, we can add wiki formats as well.

* good idea... the modal window is only for the demo, when the widget will be embedded on a website, it will take you to the search result directly. But for the demo I agree that Esc would be natural to use.

* No, the back-end is built from scratch, we crawl the contents of blogs, and run our own scripts to filter out the content, gather statistical data about the words, build expressions and rank them. Most algorithms we use are standard in NLP, a few are more experimental. We do most of the processing in Python and Perl. While we know and love Lucene, we don't use it here. We will write in more detail on our blog about the implementation details.

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