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

1 pointsby simonkafanover 3 years ago
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&#x27;s possible to change it.<p>Yesterday I searched for an article I read 2 or 3 days ago (this one: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30007856). I was 70% sure that the words &quot;home&quot; and &quot;network&quot; appeared in the post, so I searched in &quot;Stories&quot; in &quot;Past Week&quot; for these keywords and didn&#x27;t find it.<p>I had to switch to &quot;All&quot; and noticed that the search engine didn&#x27;t take the word &quot;networking&quot; 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 &quot;site:news.ycombinator.com home network&quot; into Google, I find the article without any problems.<p>So to sum up: What is the intention behind the way the search engine works? If I would type in &quot;home network&quot; in a full-text search engine, even that would give me the correct article but for some reason HN&#x27;s search engine is not capable of that.

3 comments

yamrzouover 3 years ago
It&#x27;s the first result when I search &quot;Stories&quot; in &quot;Past Week&quot;, sorted by Popularity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastWeek&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=home%20network&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastWeek&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=tru...</a><p>Is it not the case for you?
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webmobdevover 3 years ago
HN&#x27;s search is not that great. For those who don&#x27;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 <i>site:www.example.com</i> followed by the search term. (E.g <i>site:news.ycombinator.com home network</i> ).
mardiyahover 3 years ago
once i did so too<p>guess it&#x27;s simply just rather good SE not on the top class (google, amazon, yandex, bing etc)