New Experimental Version of HN Search

This is only 50% tongue in cheek, but if there were commenting and a normally ranked front page on this, I'd probably use it instead of HN itself ;-) It looks really good. (I know about all the other HN front ends but none have stuck with me.)

This post was from January, but strangely enough, it seems it never got submitted here. I've been using the Algolia HN Search "experimental" interface for months and it works really well. You can turn on the experimental interface through the "settings" link [1] on the bottom of the search page.

Some people love to see "thumbnail" images of the sites in the search results, and they most likely have all the required bandwidth/speed/latency needed to view the images without discomfort. For people on slow, high-latency Internet connections, the thumbnail image loading is slow and annoying. The good news is, after you select "experimental" mode in the settings, you can then turn off thumbnail image loading.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/settings

I agree with the other poster who didn't like the font. It's much too light. This is fixable in Firefox, but I don't see a way to do it in Safari.

It would be nice to have something akin to browsing at +5 on slashdot. Muggles can't see the karma each comment has, but maybe HN can give Algolia that information so that it can present just the top comments. For example, there have been recent threads with 600 comments. It sure would be nice to read maybe the top 10 or 20. Or maybe the top 5% of comments, minimum of 10 comments, maximum of 25 comments? That's the general idea.

As for someone else's comment about non-JS fallback, that isn't important to me. Normally I read HN w/o JS, but that's because there's no need to whitelist the site except for optional stuff like search. I would have no concerns with running HN with JS on.

Hi guys, here one of responsables for this interface, we didn't change it since January but seeing such threads make us want to add some improvements on the UI. Looks like working a bit more on the font readability could be a good start as it's something that came up several times.

FYI Here is our blogpost about this project[1].

@meeper what do you have in mind with 'recommandation system"?

[1] https://blog.algolia.com/try-new-experimental-version-hn-sea...

Please roll back to the font family, size and color of the existing version. Small, thin, light grey on a white background is not even a little bit readable. It's roughly equivalent to the "dead", greyed out comments here on HN proper in terms of pain.

Given that you probably intend for people to want to read the text you present, I bet that's not the experience you're going for.

Interestingly enough, this was built with Angular 1.

Also, after doing a couple of searches, it is clear that this is a treasure trove of interesting articles that never made it to the front-page of HN. If I was simply "surfing" for interesting things related to programming/startups/development/etc., this may well be more worthwhile than Google.

Re-posting my comment on the original blog: "Hi guys! I am just in love with the new UI. HN is my daily dose for the awesomeness and the new search is the icing on top of the cake! Cheers!"

And seriously this is there since Jan and I stumbled upon this today!

TL;DR. Try it here: https://hn.algolia.com/?experimental=true

If you guys need a recommendation system, let me know...

A non-JS fallback would be nice.