Come on guys, this is getting stupid. This site has been up for over a year, it's popular, there are tons of new stories everyday, and we still can't search! What's going on?
What's going on is that I have a few other things to do. Like writing essays and dealing with 58 (so far) startups we've invested in. Since the main advantage of implementing search would be to save people from going all the way to Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+Readmo...), it's not a huge priority.
An example: I'm running a startup from Melbourne Australia and read an interesting comment from someone in the same boat, including details of a meetup type event, a week ago.
I didn't bookmark it because I didn't expect it would be hard to find. But now I can't find it at all.
The poster mentioned Melbourne was the 'artichoke end of the world'. Googling for 'artichoke' on news.yccombinator.com has no results. How frequently does Google spider most sites anyway?
"... The poster mentioned Melbourne was the 'artichoke end of the world'. Googling for 'artichoke' on news.yccombinator.com has no results. How frequently does Google spider most sites anyway? ..."
Yeah the search here sucks. My attempt at finding stuff is to
A) save it on my blog so I have the original copy I can then search via google
Look one way to get around it is for someone to spider the site and link back (damn I lost the link .... someone has a search site where???), another is to get a google box for what USD$5K and integrate google search. As the site grows, search is becoming important for historical articles, phrases or people who you want to ascribe a comment. Guess this is what's meant by users loving new features. I'm just glad there is somewhere for stuff like this to be discussed. So while search sucks, it's not integral, for me at least.
I had problems finding stories from before the switch to putting all comments and news stories on item?id=x, because a search would go to a broken link. But the object numbers stayed the same, so if you find a story with a broken link, you can just switch comment?id=x to item?id=x.
"... I had problems finding stories from before the switch to putting all comments and news stories on item?id=x, because a search would go to a broken link. ..."
Deleted node probably. Means it's been deleted or removed by user and/or was probably edited because it was "spammish" or poor quality in nature.
"... so if you find a story with a broken link, you can just switch comment?id=x to item?id=x. ..."
This one I noted after some changes in the code probably about 2 months after I started using it. I save all my posts and the links started breaking (link checking). The term was changed from 'comment' to 'item' (guessing) because it was shorter.
Before the update, items were broken down into 'comment' and 'link' (not sure if link was the object, it might have been news) but their ID numbers didn't overlap so I assume PG combined them because their was no reason not to, except for breaking old links.
The links I was trying to find weren't actually deleted, I just wasn't finding them because I only recently figured out I need to change the link to 'item?id='
"... tems were broken down into 'comment' and 'link' (not sure if link was the object, it might have been news) but their ID numbers didn't overlap so I assume PG combined them because their was no reason not to, except for breaking old links. ..."
Thanks for that explanation. Hadn't taken the time to work this out.
"... By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages ..." ~ http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow#Specification_2005...
Damn I just thought of one problem though. "Rel=nofollow" on low priority submissions means google will have low(er) priority search? Is that right?
I don't doubt that you have many other things on your plate but surely there is someone at YC that could do this. Or if nothing else take axod's comment and open it up so that someone on here can do it for you.
Update - Make it part of the Winter YC application. Post the data we need to know and let people write the code for you.
Thank you for confirming my belief that putting up with the JVM or the CLR is worth it because you get awesome libraries like Lucene, Nutch, and most other things you want but don't want to write yourself or come up with an unsatisfactory workaround for.
Yes there's Google, but Google lacks transparency and if something doesn't index they won't tell you and there's nothing you can do about it.
ycsearch.com is not as fancy, but it is a bit easier to remember. Although, I guess it is just as easy to remember site:news.ycombinator.com, which it is functionally equivalent to.
I have one made, just trying to figure out how to share it.
I can't find anywhere on the Mozilla development site that just lets you upload the xml file. They want to make me fill out a form that builds the plugin for me. Problem is that their form isn't really powerful enough to actually make a decent plugin. What am I missing?
Just download and stick in your searchplugins directory (C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins in Windows) along with the other plugins you find there.
I have created a plugin, that can be used for searching ycombinator.It is available here: http://trk7.com/yc, on just needs to click on it to install in FF and IE7.
i don't want a toolbar. The firefox search area is about all i'm willing to use. It would be nice if pressing ctrl-enter to submit (or something as simple) would just search the site.
It would also be nice to use another key like alt or shift to dictate whether to open a new tab or use the current one.
My guess is that this takes an extension, not a plugin.
Google seems to like news.yc. I week or two ago I did a search for something obscure without using site:news.yc, and it returned a post from this site that had been posted something like 48 minutes before my search.
With so many hackers here, why doesn't someone familiar with Lisp write a simple search module and send it to PG who can just check it for sanity and plug it in? I know its not easy to do without seeing PG's source code.
PG how about making news.yc open-source so we can all work on it?
Yeah you might be right, it sure seems like it's been that long. I'm sure it was here in 06, 9 months is plenty of time to put in "select * where title like '%query%';"
Doing search right is not just a matter of searching titles. And unless you're prepared to work hard to get it right, you're probably not going to do better than Google.
Adding a sitemap might help Google index the old pages better. Adding date-based archive links (like many blogs do) would probably help as well (making the site structure more like a tree and less like a list).
