Why doesn't Hacker News have a search functionality?

2 points by priyankt 14 years ago | 6 comments

Yesterday I was reading a post regarding who's hiring on HN and it took me some time to find it again. I was really looking for a search bar, but couldn't find one. Why don't HN have a search bar?

akent 14 years ago |

Try: http://www.hnsearch.com/

There is also http://searchyc.com/ but they are currently down.

riffraff 14 years ago | |

I guess the OP would actually want to know why such a functionality is not built-in. At least I'd like to know.

I understand that there is an infinity of ingredients that make up a good search, but surely a trivial implementation would not take too much effort from PG, or at least he could bless an external one and put a form referring to it? A Google ajax search perhaps?

priyankt 14 years ago | |

Thanks for the links. Now next time if I need to search HN, I will have to find your comment first (to get links) :) It would be great to have this link on HN homepage. Also, it will help in reducing the duplicate posts. People can do a quick search and check if their topic is already posted by someone else.

patrickod 14 years ago |

I guess (but I could easily be in the wrong here) that it just hasn't been high on pg's priority list. As akent said there are alternatives out there, but I guess it would be nice to have duplicate submission detection built-in.

passionmuse 14 years ago |

I agree. I'd like to see search functionality added too. It just doesn't make a lot of sense, in my eyes, to not have it on a site like this. It would be infinitely useful on so many different levels.

akent 14 years ago | |

Apparently, wish and you shall receive! See the search box at the bottom of the page.

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#4jun11