SearchYC.com

I love it how simple hacker news is, but it wouldn't hurt to have a search feature. I mean one could use a "dirty hack" and search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com but I think it would be more relevant to have a search on the actual db, not on what google indexed.

Perhaps I'm just to blind to see it, but there seems to be no search around here.. I mean "I search might prove usefull.."

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?

Doesn't hacker news have any search facilities or filters for finding/sorting threads.

OK, I may be missing the obvious but cannot seem them. I especially want to sort threads that are posts to external material and those that are disccusions on the site.

Any enlightenment is appreciated.

The choice excludes mixed feeds like Hacker News, FriendFeed or a Google search feed.

So, if there was only one publication source for news and opinion for which you could subscribe, what would be the choice, eg a personal blog (Web Strategist), multi-user blog (TechCrunchIT, Inquistr) or a mainstream media site (NY Times Technology Sub Feed).

The focus is on original Tech/Web/IT news and opinion.

It seems that there are a few topics that come up over and over, such as Things to do in SF, Cheap Legal advice, or Credit Card processing.

I know that PG is working on search, but it might be worth while to add a Best-of-HackerNews link, which includes some of the discussions that people who are just tuning in might want to catch up on.

A Frequently Submitted Questions category might fit the bill. The Hacker News Suggestions link could also go there, tacitly encouraging people such as myself to post new suggestions there, rather the main forum.

(Maybe this type of post is not for hacker news since it is pure discussion).

Knol.

Does Google promise that their search results are always sorted by relevance or would it be ok to list Knol - entries as top results without them actually being so?

I guess since they obv know how to SEO to their own algorhitm they can make Knol have a high PageRank and I guess that would be fine.

Is there anywhere you can read about their stance on this? Is it independently verified or something(I guess not)?

Hi,

We are launching our Blog Search Engine today in private beta and I would be very happy if some of the hacker news readers could give us some valuable feedback. You can access our site under http://www.iterend.com/?ref=hn (the link will work for the first 1000 users and you have to use this link first before the other links below will work!).

So what differentiates us from other blog search engines: (e.g google blog search, technorati, twingly, etc...)

We want you to be able to actively discover the most recent, most discussed and most important articles of the blogosphere. Iterend gives you an overview of the information you are looking for, where you are then able to drill down into the different categories of interest related to that information.

* We display an overview of what is currently being discussed in the blogosphere, so that you are able to dive into the different areas you are interested in.

* All articles are linked to structured wikipedia information, which makes it possible to search by categories. (eg. http://blogs.iterend.com/en/?query=category%3A"Swimmer"+category%3A"Medalist"&date=alltime)

* Search results are clustered and you can search on sentence level, post level or blog level.

* Next to the search results, relevant phrases and categories are displayed, so you are able to restrict your search or get an overview over the information you are looking for. (eg. http://blogs.iterend.com/en/?query=techcrunch&date=alltime)

* You can search for related posts to a given topic, url or cluster (eg. http://blogs.iterend.com/en/?query=related%3A"iphone"&date=alltime)

At the moment, about 50 000 mainstream english blogs are indexed. The number of indexed blogs will be increased soon, while we will still focus on the mainstream (and hopefully spam free) blogs. We will add support to search in additional languages in the future as well.

We also offer an Api for application developers wishing to use parts of our service in their applications.

I will be very thankful for all of your comments! If someone wants to create an application out of our api (related phrases, categories, or the related search future), that would be great!

Spotstart.com is a collection of popular searchable web resources. I had a prelimiary version over a year ago, but just coded it again. If you visit the site on an iPhone, you will see a customized version (http://www.apple.com/webapps/searchtools/spotstart.html). Somehow, I think the iPhone version will be more popular. There is a category for startups which includes Hacker News searched from google.

Please let me know what you guys think. Anything to be added or removed? Thanks.

A large fraction of our http requests come from Yahoo crawlers-- almost 20% yesterday. Their crawler seems significantly stupider than Google's. Yesterday we got 12,423 requests from the Google crawler, of which 4148 were for x (= mostly useless) urls, and 43,087 requests from Yahoo crawlers, of which 30,652 were for x urls.

Unlike most sites, I'm looking for ways to constrain our growth. News.YC is deliberately not intended to become a massively popular site. So the thought occurred to me: why not just ban Yahoo crawlers? And MSN too, while we're at it. I don't know anyone who uses either of them for search. I'd just as soon have the site be invisible to them. But what does the community think? Do any hackers use Yahoo or MSN search?