History of HackerNews Search: From 2007 to 2024

We at Trieve are going to be launching a search engine for HackerNews with some additional features soon and thought it would be worth studying the history of HN search before finalizing things. Here’s what we found!

Note: Did the research using our own HN search engine! :)

Note: I was happy looking at these old HN posts and seeing that so many of the comment/post’ers from the early days of HN were, or eventually became, founders of YC companies.

First Gen | 2007-2011#

1. Search News YC (bigheadlabs) on March 17, 2007#

Written and shared by Jason Yan, Founder/CTO of Disqus (S07) (aka jsonyan), on March 17, 2007. Can still be viewed here on the internet archive.

I assume there was some indexing logic being done on the DJango server that Jason used.

2. ycsearch.com on June 27, 2007#

Quickly hacked together by Keven Lin (YC S07) (aka keven) on June 27, 2007.

I could not find a screenshot on Internet Archive, but Keven explained he built it with cse.google.com.

3. Search ‘Hacker News’ (trk7.com) on September 18, 2007#

Created and shared by Kesevan (aka cosmok) on September 18, 2007.

Can see the UI at this link on the internet archive.

In the text of the original post (see here), cosmok explains that he built it using Yahoo’s search API.

4. searchyc.com (independent) on Dec 31, 2007 | First with Some Staying Power#

Independently created and shared by Mike Cheng (aka chengmi) and Alaska Miller (aka alaskamiller) on Dec 31, 2007.

I surmise from the comment on the post that the motivation here was ycsearch being limited in terms of HN-specific filters and the bigheadlabs one being un-maintained.

Judging from the last paulg comment on this thread it seems like, similar to ycsearch, it was built using cse.google.com.

The HN community seemed to get a lot of value out of it as in a HN thread posted when it went down on June 1 of 2011 there are multiple users explaining how important it was to them:

iheartmemcache: This service is a major component of this community; as such, I’ll host this on whatever metal you need. My contact information is in my profile. Ping me on G-talk and we can have this sorted out by the morning (if you’re in PST).

bkrausz: What kind of traffic does SearchYC get? Is a $40/mo Linode not sufficient? I would gladly pay that (or be content with some Google ads in the right bar). Hell, I’d even maintain the site…it’s a great service.

g123g: Hopfully you will be able to bring it back soon. SearchYC.com is the best way to search the treasure trove that HN has become.

Worth mentioning that HNSearch (mentioned further below) was up by this point in time. Judging by comments on the shutdown post it seems like traffic was somewhat split:

swombat: What’s wrong with http://www.hnsearch.com ?

evangineer: Just got zero hits on a search that I know there is at least one result for. Same search worked fine on searchyc.com a few days ago.

Second Gen - Octopart/ThriftDB-powered HNSearch | 2011-2014#

The official launch of HNSearch was posted by Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator itself (aka pg), and Andres Morey, founder of Octopart (W07) (aka andres), separately on June 4, 2011. Andres posted it as an API contest here to build the best thing on top of the HNSearch API where the winner would get a 27-inch Dell monitor. PG posted it as an official announcement on HN here which linked to ycombinator.com in a now only archive-available page.

Building search for HN has certainly been a trial for us and we felt validated seeing that PG first mentioned the Octopart guys using ThriftDB to make this in 2007 4yrs before it released.

I think the best part of HNSearch was that third-party applications were built on top of it. It seems, judging by the HNSearch shutdown post, that it was well-loved by HN users and also well-replaced by Algolia.

clamprecht: Can someone outline the benefits of the new one over the old one? When I first tried the new one, the UI was severely lacking. I saw the fixed a few things, but I haven’t evaluated it again. I don’t always use the HN search engine, but when I do, it’s usually very helpful. I’d hate to lose that.

swahI noticed the new one is much faster..

Third Gen - Algolia powered search | 2014-current#

The first HN post I was able to find mentioning Algolia HN search was Ask HN: What do you think about our last HN Search update? on Jan 26, 2014 posted by Julian Lemoine, founder/CTO of Algolia (W14) aka jlemoine.

Algolia’s ability to get HN search up so quickly is really impressive. If you look at the Github repo it seems like they started in Sep 2013 and released in Jan 2014.

We also took about 6 months to get everything up having started in Feb 2024 and releasing in Aug 2024. I can say now, with firsthand experience, that timeline is not easy to operate on. Especially given certain devtooling was less mature in 2013.

Algolia asked the community for feedback post-launch in 2014 and implemented several improvements including additional filter types and improved indexing speed in late 2023. We think it’s incredibly accurate for keyword search and has all the filters and options that we would want.

Honorable Mentions during the Algolia era#

• hackersearch.net by jnnnthnn posted May 2024 | semantic search engine using OpenAI embeddings
• deephn.org by wolfgarbe posted April 13, 2021 | full-text search of both HN posts and linked webpages
• hackernews.demo.vectara.com by ofermend posted July 2024 | semantic search for past 6mths of data
• searchhacker.news by isoprophlex posted April 2024 | keyword search over discussions re-ranked by dense semantic vectors
• hn.lixiasearch.com by larose posted February 2024 | unknown data level and indexing strategy
• orangewords.com by cmcollier (not posted to HN yet) | all of HN indexed in Vespa with RAG