Tell HN: Hacker News has a search bar for algolia at the bottom of the page | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Hacker News has a search bar for algolia at the bottom of the page

Everyone always mentions hn.algolia.com search which I sometimes use. Today I learned that if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page on hacker news, there's a search bar which you can type into, and it will directly route your search to algolia!

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Algolia is a ycombinator company. There used to be a different HN search before they took control of it. I believe it was partially done as a marketing move.

Ah yes I remember. Any way to find what it was like? Is there any archive.org link or something?

It was beautiful

If you go to altavista.com they have a search box that searches the whole internet - can you believe it? The joys of the modern internet in 2022!

Damn, why was this downvoted???

I punched in a very hard to find search word and viola!

Upvoted!

> viola!

voilà!

I blame US-centric Apple auto-correct, despite using Canadian-EN keyboard setting.

The duckduckgo bang !hn redirects the search to algolia

Real tip is always in the comments.

Cannot tell if this is satire. Your precision pointing device has an alternative clicking mode, commonly referred to as right click. Have you discovered that yet?

I'm sorry to have offended you. I've been a user for under a year compared to you for eleven, so perhaps I haven't discovered all the features of this website that you have. In particular, I never thought to wonder about the text box at the bottom of the page. I always glossed over it while scrolling to the bottom on mobile. I figured this feature might be non-obvious to other users as well, which is why I posted it.

It happens. I can relate.

I wish flagged stories could be included in algolia HN search.

Sometimes I just want to see what's been submitted on a given topic regardless of flagged (or dead) status.

I have been meaning to ask about that. It sucks big time. It finds anything but what I search for. I always have to resort to ddg or google.

I hate to be snarky, but I've almost considered Algolia for search on side projects a couple of times, and every time gone back to the HN search to see if it had improved.

It hadn't, so I've yet to use it (and just always spin up an ElasticSearch instance instead)

It's very possibly an unfair critique (by me) because I don't know what data modeling tools are available to HN admins (via Algolia) and I can certainly appreciate by the terrible search results if nothing else that HN gets a lot of duplicated content that does not match my data creation patterns, but while it's often that I'll go to the search to find the discussion for a topic I remember seeing within the past week but is clearly no longer on the home page, I can count on zero hands the number of times I've found it through the search.

I don't use the search box at the bottom because it doesn't use my search preferences. I go directly to the URL instead.

Also, it has an API.

https://hn.algolia.com/api

It's broken in at least one way: If I search for all my comments, across all time, I only get comments from 8 years ago and greater.

You have to sort by date: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I don't want to sort by date. I want to sort by popularity, and have it include all my comments, not just the ones from 8 years ago.

And if I do sort by date, then in only includes my comments for the last six months, not my comments for all of time.

But there may be a clue there: In both cases, it stopped at 34 pages of comments.

You can't sort it by popularity because HN stopped exposing comment scores via API several years ago. Hence sort by popularity is broken on the search page. Only you can see the number of votes on your comments.

I think that's because older comments have a public points field, whereas newer comments don't show the amount of points. So they're ranked lower in the default search settings

What's even better is that you can access it with duckduckgo !hn bang.

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