It has lost a lot of usability for searches I used to do. (And, alas, since many of my examples of searches were stored in Google Chrome as form entries for the previous interface, I'll have to think for a while about what my typical searches used to look like.) How does one do usability tests on changes like this?
AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the comment posted previously that points out that I can, for the moment, use HNSearch
I think it's great that YCombinator is "eating its own dogfood" and the new site has some cool features, like instant search results.
I have a few concerns, though.
I think that there is too much whitespace, which makes content discovery take longer. An infinite scroll interface is not appropriate for HN. Content is not added as quickly as Twitter, and infinite scroll makes searching for the oldest comment or story (is that still possible?) a nightmare. Separating the username from the points/# of comments by placing it on the top right also makes scansion more difficult.
The previous search engine's syntax no longer works and the functionality it offered seems to not have been replaced (If that's not true, please let me know).
Where is the "order by time" functionality. This is pretty much useless now for searching old stuff you recall. I still use Google "site:news.ycombinator.com keyword" query to search on HN as many of those homemade search engines are not handling synonyms and plurals etc well.
The order by time and filtering to only stories/comments was the reason I used HNSearch before. The new interface takes away all of that flexibility and makes finding things a lot harder.
It does not clearly allow searching for stories, comments, or users.
It does not clearly allow sorting by relevance, date or score.
The screenshots are useless and take up valuable screen space, disrupting the flow of text and making it hard to scan. It is especially bad on a mobile phone.
The excerpts of text are too long, requiring you to scroll pages and pages when all you need are titles.
There is too much wasted blank space on the pages.
The search results look more like a daily digest you'd read in email, than search results you'd use to quickly find what you're looking for.
As someone who uses hnsearch literally every day, this makes me a little concerned.
I'm active in the Rust community, and my usecase involves searching for the keyword "Rust" and sorting by date in order to figure out where the current discussions are happening. Without the capability to quickly zero-in on recent comments (especially given the lack of any automatic notification of comment replies), HN will be much diminished for me.
Are there plans to both begin indexing comments and to add a sort-by-date feature?
Thanks! It's great to hear you found HNSearch useful. We were very happy to power search for HN but we haven't been able to dedicate much time to making it better. It's exciting to see Algolia iterating on HN's search functionality.
I use hnsearch quite a bit as a general search/opinion tool. I use it less as a gateway to HN and more as filtering tool (wherein I expect readable, non-italic versions of the comments on the result page). For instance if I was curious if Don DeLillo ever popped up in HN comments.
Algolia's manages to find a result that hnsearch doesn't, but on the other hand all of the white noise surrounding each result and false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian, and frankly is difficult to visually parse.
The HN comments are useful body of knowledge if you use it the right way. Having a fast, easy to read search that lets you scan for the best comments on a subject is really handy. Focus on the text and readability because that's all that's important.
I also use Pinboard and Quora (and to some degree Reddit) for this kind of opinion/commentary based research.
false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian
Those aren't false positives, those are additional helpful results in case you accidentally typed "Don Delillo" instead of "Delicious don't" or "dealloc done". I know I do that all the time!
Unhelpful sarcasm aside, it's nice that the results that contain the actual search are at least above the non-results. But I really don't like trend of search engines to include results that don't include any of the search terms above results that contain some of them. If you search for just "Delillo", you'll come up with a lot of results that are probably relevant to the user's intention.
Offering "If you didn't find what you were looking, maybe you meant:" alternatives could be helpful, but if not hidden (preferable), at the least these results should be clearly delineated from the actual matches. Google's approach of showing certain terms with a strike-through is the minimum I'd accept happily.
edit: Yuck, when I wrote this I hadn't even realized that it keeps loading non-relevant results in an endless scroll.
I m a search engineer among other things. New update is weird, especially ranking. try 'machine learning', gets something from a year ago then Stanford class from 2011, really ? If you re dealing with 10M entries in the index this is low enough that ranking should be better.
I know how perfect tuning these engine as is difficult, and this one requires some more work ;) good luck and congrats for YC 14 anyways!
For now, the ranking is only based on the number of points/comments of an item. We're actually working on a way to include the freshness of a post. Thanks for the support ;)
I love how fast it is! Two things I rely on heavily with the old hnsearch are (a) restrict to stories or comments, and (b) sort by date (most recent first). Can you please do those? Especially the second one.
Relevancy is all wrong. I searched for spark and the top result is from two years ago. I want the most recent result first, like email. Relevancy should be a function of tf/idf, comment count and recency, biased towards the latter.
Sadly, I don't like this much at all. I don't see any way to filter by whether the searched for keyword appears in the title or in comments, or to sort by date, etc. This appears to be much less useful for the kinds of searches I do.
I noticed its been updated so here are a few concerns still:
-I prefer the old date search compare to the new options that mimic how Google does it. I prefer the ability to sort by relevance vs date (in descending from most recent) the way HN search does it. Simply restricting to most recent by a certain timeframe doesn't let me expand beyond the period specified and currently it doesn't sort the date in order (at least not when choosing forever)
-Negative keyword parameter no longer available
-Title search parameter is also gone
-Not sure how the relevancy algorithm is calculated but for tests I've ran, it is showing some really old posts (2 years ago) at the top which makes no sense
can we have an option to use the old version as well?
I use your search all the time and this new version doesn't work well enough yet.
I like to search by date (newest at top) and then toggle between stories and comments. also would be nice to allow stemming or not, i.e. search for "julia" comes up with stuff about juliaN assange.
Can anyone comment on why Swiftype (a YC search-as-a-service) startup isn't providing search for HN? It seems like an obvious choice (although the Octopart-powered search seemed to work great).
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the comment posted previously that points out that I can, for the moment, use HNSearch
https://www.hnsearch.com/
to find threads the way I'm used to finding them.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fsck--off|12 years ago|reply
I have a few concerns, though.
I think that there is too much whitespace, which makes content discovery take longer. An infinite scroll interface is not appropriate for HN. Content is not added as quickly as Twitter, and infinite scroll makes searching for the oldest comment or story (is that still possible?) a nightmare. Separating the username from the points/# of comments by placing it on the top right also makes scansion more difficult.
The previous search engine's syntax no longer works and the functionality it offered seems to not have been replaced (If that's not true, please let me know).
How do you:
Search for comments written by a certain author
Look at an individual comment's score
Search by date
Search exclusively for stories or comments
[+] [-] redox_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aabalkan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diziet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcvarmint|12 years ago|reply
It does not clearly allow searching for stories, comments, or users.
It does not clearly allow sorting by relevance, date or score.
The screenshots are useless and take up valuable screen space, disrupting the flow of text and making it hard to scan. It is especially bad on a mobile phone.
The excerpts of text are too long, requiring you to scroll pages and pages when all you need are titles.
There is too much wasted blank space on the pages.
The search results look more like a daily digest you'd read in email, than search results you'd use to quickly find what you're looking for.
At least hnsearch.com still works, for now.
[+] [-] kibwen|12 years ago|reply
I'm active in the Rust community, and my usecase involves searching for the keyword "Rust" and sorting by date in order to figure out where the current discussions are happening. Without the capability to quickly zero-in on recent comments (especially given the lack of any automatic notification of comment replies), HN will be much diminished for me.
Are there plans to both begin indexing comments and to add a sort-by-date feature?
[+] [-] dbaupp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlemoine|12 years ago|reply
We will ask for new feedback after :)
[+] [-] pdog|12 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.hnsearch.com/
[+] [-] andres|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dictum|12 years ago|reply
You should default to HTTPS for all links to HN.
[+] [-] squintychino|12 years ago|reply
[1]: Unnecessary
[+] [-] look_lookatme|12 years ago|reply
Compare the results:
https://hn.algolia.io/?q=Don%20Delillo https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Don+Delillo
Algolia's manages to find a result that hnsearch doesn't, but on the other hand all of the white noise surrounding each result and false positives further down the page feels anti-utilitarian, and frankly is difficult to visually parse.
The HN comments are useful body of knowledge if you use it the right way. Having a fast, easy to read search that lets you scan for the best comments on a subject is really handy. Focus on the text and readability because that's all that's important.
I also use Pinboard and Quora (and to some degree Reddit) for this kind of opinion/commentary based research.
[+] [-] nkurz|12 years ago|reply
Those aren't false positives, those are additional helpful results in case you accidentally typed "Don Delillo" instead of "Delicious don't" or "dealloc done". I know I do that all the time!
Unhelpful sarcasm aside, it's nice that the results that contain the actual search are at least above the non-results. But I really don't like trend of search engines to include results that don't include any of the search terms above results that contain some of them. If you search for just "Delillo", you'll come up with a lot of results that are probably relevant to the user's intention.
Offering "If you didn't find what you were looking, maybe you meant:" alternatives could be helpful, but if not hidden (preferable), at the least these results should be clearly delineated from the actual matches. Google's approach of showing certain terms with a strike-through is the minimum I'd accept happily.
edit: Yuck, when I wrote this I hadn't even realized that it keeps loading non-relevant results in an endless scroll.
[+] [-] rdl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlemoine|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilooch|12 years ago|reply
I know how perfect tuning these engine as is difficult, and this one requires some more work ;) good luck and congrats for YC 14 anyways!
[+] [-] redox_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarygrizzly|12 years ago|reply
- IMHO it does not fit in the spartanic style of HN (which I like!)
- there is no "search by date" which I use very often
Is there still an old version of search available?
[+] [-] gruseom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|12 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, it's not any more powerful than the previous HNSearch API (search query is limited to 1000 entries: http://hn.algolia.io/api/v1/search?query=pg&hitsPerPage=2000 )
[+] [-] namenotrequired|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlemoine|12 years ago|reply
We have written a blog post about the change if you want more details: http://blog.algolia.com/hacker-news-search-algolia/
[+] [-] hnriot|12 years ago|reply
But the instant search and screenshot is good.
[+] [-] mindcrime|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neverland|12 years ago|reply
-I prefer the old date search compare to the new options that mimic how Google does it. I prefer the ability to sort by relevance vs date (in descending from most recent) the way HN search does it. Simply restricting to most recent by a certain timeframe doesn't let me expand beyond the period specified and currently it doesn't sort the date in order (at least not when choosing forever)
-Negative keyword parameter no longer available
-Title search parameter is also gone
-Not sure how the relevancy algorithm is calculated but for tests I've ran, it is showing some really old posts (2 years ago) at the top which makes no sense
[+] [-] seoguru|12 years ago|reply
I like to search by date (newest at top) and then toggle between stories and comments. also would be nice to allow stemming or not, i.e. search for "julia" comes up with stuff about juliaN assange.
[+] [-] panarky|12 years ago|reply
Where does the comment karma come from? Doesn't seem like you can get it by crawling HN directly.
[+] [-] benologist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redox_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] louthy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clamprecht|12 years ago|reply