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Comment by distalx | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I know the feeling! It can be frustrating when we can't find something we're sure we saw on HN.

When default search failed me in the past, I've had some luck with experimental search projects that people have created. I'm sharing them hoping one might help you find what you're looking for:

* [Vectara](https://search-hackernews.vercel.app/) * [Hacker Search](https://hackersearch.net/) * [HN Discussion Search](https://searchhacker.news/) * [Hacker News Search](https://hn.lixiasearch.com/) * [DeepHN](https://deephn.org/)

Give them a try and see if any of these tools can help you track down the post you're looking for. Good luck!

View on HN

Thanks for these! I tried a few of these and https://hn.lixiasearch.com/ turned up exactly what I was looking for as the first result. Gonna have to bookmark that one. I also had a HN story I've been looking for that I couldn't find via HN's algolia search, nor any major search engine.

What did you search for anyways?

This was the post I was looking for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29894300

This was last night so I'm forgetting exactly what I searched but it was something like: "blog about a developer helping his mom with her chromebook she couldn't update".

HN's algolia search is sometimes helpful but you need to know exactly what was either in the title or in the comments. I tried multiple keywords like "ChromeOS", "mom", "javascript error", "chromebook", and so on. I couldn't remember the exact details of the story. Now that I know "optional chaining" is in the title, I can find it right away.

All of them except the last one were nice. Turned up a lot of results I wasn't getting from Algolia, DDG, or Google. Unfortunately, even after digging through pages and pages, I couldn't find what I was looking for. :-(

I might just have to say "I messed up by not bookmarking this" and accept that I'll likely never see it again.

Thanks anyway. :-)

Is this an AI generated comment?

Certainly feels a bit like AI. People on HN are overly nice* sometimes, it contributes to this feeling a lot

*Not a bad thing, I'm just saying the comment could be shorter by 50% and stil convey the same meaning

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