Suggest HN: Please keep hnsearch.com up | Hacker News Reader

Suggest HN: Please keep hnsearch.com up

20 pointsjyu14 comments

The new replacement hn search (hn.algolia.com) doesn't accept basic search syntax.

Searching for "arkos" or arkos returns the same number of results with fuzzy matches. http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/prefix/0/arkos

I tried other standard search syntax found on Google or SOLR, but it did not work. For example, -argos, NOT argos, etc. I tried to find search query details in their documentation, but did not find any.

Please keep hnsearch.com working in the meantime, and don't shut it down on March 15th, 2014.

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HNSearch is way better than the Algolia search, but the thing is that neither is run by Hacker News. HNSearch is run by ThriftDB, and they are apparently not interested in doing so anymore.

When the announcement to shut down HNSearch was made nearly 40 days ago, I thought Algolia would have ample time to catch up. It was lacking back then, and there was plenty of feedback for them to work with.

With the hard cutoff date nearing, it doesn't seem Algolia will be close to matching functionality.

A couple other features are date range search, and phrase search. Actually, just include all the SOLR query syntax: http://www.solrtutorial.com/solr-query-syntax.html

Oh, I completely agree, the Algolia search is painfully lacking. I'm just saying, if you want Thrift to keep their search engine up, you'd probably be better off talking to them since AFAIK Hacker News isn't in charge of it.

hn.algolia.com is also fully opensource, so pull requests are welcome: https://github.com/algolia/hn-search

Thank you for pointing that out! I (and at least three other people judging from the comment count here) had no idea.

For information all exact matches are before fuzzy matches, so why do you want to have a "arkos" syntax ?

We are improving hn.algolia.com on a regular basis, so feel free to open a feature request :)

I fully agree, UX-wise the replacement feels like a huge downgrade. No filtering comments vs. posts and no sorting options are my biggest gripes.

Hmmm, did you check our last version? http://i.imgur.com/K9ZP9R3.png

Interesting, I tried it out right before so as to not make any false claims, but I was using the mobile site and those options weren't there.

We have added the filtering on comments, story & poll some weeks ago and we have also added sort. Did you saw that ?

Is a google search unacceptable?

Google searches aren't very good for, say, finding all comments by tptacek on DNSSEC sorted by date.

The current Algolia search does this:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=DNSSEC#!/comment/sort_by_date/pref... author:tptacek

Corrected link: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=DNSSEC#!/comment/sort_by_date/pref...

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