Ask HN: How do I find out whether something was submitted? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I find out whether something was submitted?

3 pointsapotheon10 comments

I'd like to be able to find out whether a specific Webpage was already submitted without having to submit it myself in the process. Is there some mechanism for doing that here?

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It's not perfect, but you can go to http://searchyc.com/ and (on the results page) choose "submissions". Sometimes a domain-only search is good (if the topic you're looking for has a unique domain), other times you'll need to come up with some combination of domain and title keywords.

Or you can do a Google search with "site:" and "link:" like http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...

there's a 'HNSearch' icon at the bottom-right of your screen :o)

Does it somehow allow me to search by target URL for the headline link?

HN automatically redirects you to the page if the link was already submitted. This works most of the time. If you really want to be certain you can try searching in searchyc.com.

I said I'd like to know without having to submit it -- in short, without a submission showing up if it doesn't already exist on HN. Sometimes, I just want to know if something has already been submitted, and am not trying to submit it.

why ? All it does is count your submission as a vote towards the original, that's ok isn't it ?

So -- are you saying that I'm doing things in the wrong order? Should I always know for sure whether I want to submit something before I check to see if it has already been submitted? What if I want to check whether it has been submitted before I finish reading it, and don't want to submit something without reading it in full?

Are you saying this capability doesn't exist, but unwilling to just come out and say so because you fear I'll dislike the lack of such a feature? I'm confused about the reason for questions without answers in response to my own question.

I'm afraid I don't follow you.

If you want to submit something but you're not sure if it has been submitted or not the dupe filter will tell you so clearly.

If you don't want so submit something before you've read it in full then simply read it first, then submit it.

anyway, the easiest way to search any site is simply like this:

go to google.com

type:

site:news.ycombinator.com your search keywords

the space between the .com and the first keywords is crucial.

In other words, yes -- you're saying I'm doing things in the wrong order, and I shouldn't care whether something's on HN before I decide whether I want to submit it, dammit.

I believe the poster might mean, for example but not only, checking whether something has been submitted and has interesting comments. They may not be interested (yet) in submitting the item themselves, but would like to know whether it already has some context on HN.

As for how to go about this, I second your suggestion of resorting to a google search. There may be some delay between prior submissions and those submissions' indexing, but in the past (some time ago) others have commented here that google seems to have a certain fondness for frequent updates of its indexing of news.ycombinator.com .

I haven't tried this site's search feature recently. Does it perform well?

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