HN Search updated again | Hacker News Reader

HN Search updated again

34 pointsredox_29 comments

We have just updated HN Search (http://hn.algolia.com) with major improvements:

- Mobile version: it now works just like your desktop version. You can select what you want to search (all, story, comment, poll) and refine/sort your queries by date (last 24h, past week, past month, forever).

- Phrase queries: they are now supported in the parser using "" syntax. This syntax also disables prefix search and typo tolerance for the terms of the phrase query.

- Not: we have added support of negative terms in your query (using -term syntax).

As usual, your feedback is more than welcome. We also appreciate pull requests & feature requests on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/algolia/hn-search

View on HN

I spent probably 20 a few days ago trying to find the HN discussion for the ElasticSearch 1.0 release (as I'd remembered there being some useful comments there about using ES as a document store, but not their exact contents), and ended up with nothing. Ultimately, I ended up spending another 45 minutes on the general internet trying to piece together the bits of the comment I remembered.

With the new update, I tried the same query as I had, and it was immediately the very first result.

BRILLIANT.

Care to link to that comment? :)

Gladly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7225589

It was more the thread in total than any single comment, but literally, that whole page was all but invisible to search just a few days ago.

Please switch the default option from "story" to "all".

The legacy style screen has a minor rendering error in Firefox 31:

http://imgur.com/tkqCRGh

My comment from a previous story is still relevant:

The search results for stories show both the long (and useless) news.ycombinator URL and a link to the comments. Both links lead to the same location. The news.ycombinator URL displayed is redundant and adds visual noise. I've highlighted both links in the image linked to below.

I'd like it if the results showed "link", "parent", and "on $News_Story", like the old site did.

http://imgur.com/asHzSb1

Make sense, I removed the useless link on stories and polls (keep it on comments, in order to jump on the associated comment in the HN thread using an anchor). I also deployed a CSS enhancement regarding the rendering error, is it better?

The rendering error appears to have been fixed. Thank you.

Just out of curiosity, why is the default for search "story" instead of "all"? I believe that hnsearch.com's default was "all".

We think most users are searching for stories, but maybe we're wrong. Btw, we're currently working on an analytics feature that process all queries performed on an Algolia account. I'll use it to count the number of queries performed on comments/stories/all. Data-driven isn't it? ;)

Sorry for hijacking this, but can anyone that know someone at DuckDuckGo ask them to change !hn from http://hnsearch.com/ to http://hn.algolia.com/ ?

I've already contacted them with the form on their site a week or so ago, but it's still using the old search, which is not working anymore now.

Again, sorry for the hijack, but posting requests over here seems to be the fastest way to have something done.

I asked for the update submitting the newbang form (https://duckduckgo.com/newbang), no reply so far. Help is really welcome :/

Seems !hn bang command has been updated \o/ Thank you guys

Thanks for the heads up! We're on it! The fix probably came in mid-update and didn't get included in this batch. Rolling out a hotfix for it shortly, though.

Should be fixed now! Thanks again.

Thank you!

same issue in google.

It looks great on my iphone.

The only other thing I would request is perhaps the screenshots that appear on the desktop version?

Could you also possibly try to get somone to make the main HN site responsive on mobile? I'm surprised why this has not been done yet. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

Actually the screenshots are currently hidden on small screens in order to give more space to the worthy content. Maybe we could have an option to display them smaller.

Probably a good call.

What about the main HN site? Do you guys have any plans to make it responsive? It's just really hard to comment from your mobile device.

Imo the default search shouldn't return hidden comments and stories. While it might sometimes be useful to do so, I'm finding it mostly results in spam showing up. As much as I do appreciate the opportunity to buy https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cheap+nike+shoes ...

I wonder why HN is a target for spam links like this? All URLs have nofollow so it's not for SEO. And most accounts that submit them are usually dead on arrival (or shortly after). So what's the upside here? People like you? Will you buy Nike shoes now?

I don't think spammers think much before they act. Or they're just bots.

Sure, but even bots and spammers costs money. Seems like spamming HN is throwing money away.

The cost of running the bot ($0, since it's just desktop software you can run overnight while you sleep) is the same whether it automatically posts to 1,000 sites or 999. The bot itself [1] is also often free because, who'd've guessed it, people who spam links around the web indiscriminately have no problem with pirating software too.

1: http://www.botmasterlabs.net/

Right, we've still some issues with some dead/deleted comments/stories being indexed. A full-reindexing is scheduled in the next few days and should fix it.

Could you please put a summary of all the available search options right on the search page?

Yep, will be easier :) Just opened a feature-request about it. (https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/25)

Love the work you've done with this. The feature I'm always wishing you had was the ability to filter by number of comments in post as it's a pretty fair marker of relevance on alot of queries.

Right, and actually I've opened a feature-request about that a few days ago (https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/24). Gonna work on it in the next few days.

Feature Request: Use `by:` as a synonym for `author:`

Done & deployed!

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