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It all depends on what you’re trying to find when you search. Google knows your background, Algolia doesn’t.

I too built a search engine:

https://demo.insideropinion.com/meta_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93...

I find it works 100x better for me, when I weight results by my expertise. Basically, returning results based on what I already am familiar with.

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The results aren't necessarily better because of the Google knowledge of you, because they are pretty good results even in Private browsing without being logged in.

It just seems to me that HN search does a simple keyword matching and reordering based on points without any ranking (please someone correct if I'm wrong).

So freshness doesn't seem to have any value, but the reality is that, at least in tech, very few content is evergreen. Also, when you try to reorder by date for example, you'll end up with a lot of empty threads which again are not that useful. I'm not sure if there's a way of eliminating empty threads from search results.

They rank by popularity by default (up votes), but I agree generally their API doesn’t seem to do ranking.

FWIW, Private browsing doesn't prevent Google to tailor results to what it can guess about you: https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/

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