Pardon me and I don't want to come off as ignorant, what is the big deal with this? I have been using Google to search hackernews articles by querying `<subject> site:news.ycombinator.com` and it has worked wonders.
Since hackernews is all publicly available, Googlebots must have indexed every single page of this site. And we all know how good Google has been with ranking and relevance. Why did HN decide to reinvent the wheel? Why didn't HN use the Google Custom Search plugin?
The problem with Google Search for a site like Hacker News is that it doesn't have the same level of understanding of the metadata that makes up the site. A good example is sort-by-date (which Google can approximate based on the date something was first spotted by its crawlers, but it's not nearly as accurate as having access to the "date" field in the underlying data structures) - another is "just search comments by this username".
SearchYC allowed results to be sorted by date of submission, allowed searches by username and points, and other aspects that Google simply doesn't understand and can't provide.
HNSearch is an Octopart/ThriftDB project to test out our search technology and give back to the HN community.
Google has access to the link structure of the internet so it's great for macro searches. However, if you want to do a site-specific micro search then it usually helps to have access to the underlying metadata (e.g. points, karma, timestamps).
Comments
Pardon me and I don't want to come off as ignorant, what is the big deal with this? I have been using Google to search hackernews articles by querying `<subject> site:news.ycombinator.com` and it has worked wonders.
Since hackernews is all publicly available, Googlebots must have indexed every single page of this site. And we all know how good Google has been with ranking and relevance. Why did HN decide to reinvent the wheel? Why didn't HN use the Google Custom Search plugin?
(I am just curious to know and not criticizing.)
The problem with Google Search for a site like Hacker News is that it doesn't have the same level of understanding of the metadata that makes up the site. A good example is sort-by-date (which Google can approximate based on the date something was first spotted by its crawlers, but it's not nearly as accurate as having access to the "date" field in the underlying data structures) - another is "just search comments by this username".
SearchYC allowed results to be sorted by date of submission, allowed searches by username and points, and other aspects that Google simply doesn't understand and can't provide.
HNSearch is an Octopart/ThriftDB project to test out our search technology and give back to the HN community.
Google has access to the link structure of the internet so it's great for macro searches. However, if you want to do a site-specific micro search then it usually helps to have access to the underlying metadata (e.g. points, karma, timestamps).
Google is great for simple searches, but fails utterly for any site-specific filtering of results.