Please don't break the spacebar key acting as page down.
The search text box takes all the key presses regardless of focus. I find this annoying in a 'breaks expectations' kind of way.
If its Solr or Lucene running underneath then you could use phonetic analyzer to get expected results if the spelling is not correct. I got results with'Steve Jobs'but when I tried 'Steve Jbs' I got no results. I would say getting close results is better than no results.
If there are only a few options for a variable, could you have them be expressed as part of the object returned by
<a href="http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?pretty_print=true" rel="nofollow">http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?pretty_print=...</a>
Example: Type. Although it is a string, it isn't really a string field. It is a binary choice between two preset strings (comment or submission).<p>It would make using the schema for things much easier.
I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that sometimes the points field is null, even though it shouldn't be. See for example the second result here:<p><a href="http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=skype&filter%5Bfields%5D%5Btype%5D%5B%5D=submission&sortby=points+desc&_=1307314960533&pretty_print=true" rel="nofollow">http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=sky...</a>
Looks like items marked [dead] in HN will show up as zombie search results -- i.e., they get returned in the search results for the items collection but the discussion field is null.<p>For example: filter[fields][type]=comment&filter[fields][username]=pg<p>...the second result there has a null discussion field. Getting the submission title &etc. would be nice.
I'm not sure US users have noticed, but I can't use the service from Europe, Hungary. It just keeps connecting to the api, tested with latest Chrome and FF.