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Search hacker news

11 pointscatalinist18 comments

I love it how simple hacker news is, but it wouldn't hurt to have a search feature. I mean one could use a "dirty hack" and search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com but I think it would be more relevant to have a search on the actual db, not on what google indexed.

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there's this: http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/

How about a link to that, then, on the top bar, since everybody wants search?

Some companies that provide search programs off-the-shelf.

http://www.approximatch.com/

http://www.data-essence.com/ (stealth)

At the end of the day Reddit has search...eventually this site too..

Google's already done the leg work with Google custom search for your site:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

Although I don't know if you have to sell your soul to use it or not.

I've used it on some sites and it usually... sucks.

This has been requested many times, and users are begging for it. PG, is there a reason why it's not implemented? If the implementation is hard, then maybe you can use Google or bigheadlabs's solution!

Google will even pay you to use their solution.

HAH. I had it on a site that got hundreds of thousands of searches and it made maybe a dollar, total ever. What a joke.

The implementation can't be that hard ... come on ... it's about doing some query on the database.

That is really not the case. Search is a hard problem.

After all, what is search, really, except to look for things that are already inside of us?

In general, yes. In news.yc's case, no.

I must disagree in this case.

As I recall he plans to do it, but wants to spend the time to make it good (and we can assume he doesn't have many big chunks of free time).

actually I found a PHP script for this today at http://scripts.suramya.com/ while looking for a gimpshop debian installer. I'm not sure if it works but it looks good. its PHP...

How about to type:

your_search_here site:news.ycombinator.com

in Google?

that's what I was reffering to when I wrote "search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com"

Exactly. I use it even for sites that have search - it's much more accurate.

And if you search a site often, you can create a macroexpansion for the address bar - e.g. in my browser (safari + sogudi) "w lisp" expands to http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+lisp

Don't ask others to solve your problems, solve it yourself.

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