Ask HN: Am I using it wrongly or is HN's search engine bad?

1 points by simonkafan 4 years ago | 5 comments

This is not a rant rather than a serious question if I a) use the tool the wrong way or b) in case not, if it's possible to change it.

Yesterday I searched for an article I read 2 or 3 days ago (this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007856). I was 70% sure that the words "home" and "network" appeared in the post, so I searched in "Stories" in "Past Week" for these keywords and didn't find it.

I had to switch to "All" and noticed that the search engine didn't take the word "networking" into account which appeared in the title. I would argue that stemming and searching for root words is a basic feature of a modern search engine, if I type "site:news.ycombinator.com home network" into Google, I find the article without any problems.

So to sum up: What is the intention behind the way the search engine works? If I would type in "home network" in a full-text search engine, even that would give me the correct article but for some reason HN's search engine is not capable of that.

yamrzou 4 years ago |

It's the first result when I search "Stories" in "Past Week", sorted by Popularity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

Is it not the case for you?

simonkafan 4 years ago | |

Ah I see it now: "prefix=true" is the property that apparently includes "networking" when searched for "network"

simonkafan 4 years ago | |

Not for "home network": https://ibb.co/59yFDT5

webmobdev 4 years ago |

HN's search is not that great. For those who don't know about this, you can tell search engines like Google or Yandex to search for your keyword only on a particular website with the search filter site:www.example.com followed by the search term. (E.g site:news.ycombinator.com home network ).

mardiyah 4 years ago |

once i did so too

guess it's simply just rather good SE not on the top class (google, amazon, yandex, bing etc)