Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News
Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…
Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News launched on May 2, 2024 with 233 votes, #209 of 4,539 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
Hacker Search is a semantic search engine for Hacker News that allows users to find relevant articles by typing keywords or descriptions rather than exact search terms. It uses OpenAI's embedding models combined with traditional indexing of scraped link content to surface top Hacker News stories with brief summaries. The tool is designed for anyone looking to discover Hacker News articles without needing to match keywords precisely.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Hacker Search is no longer available.
Hacker Search was a tool for understanding HN readers' sentiment and looking for expert insights on topics of interest to HN readers. @jnnnthnn built it in 2024 when it was still unclear how to get LLMs to do this job well. Fast forward to today, any free chatbot on the internet can do this well! Yet all endeavors, Hacker Search included, require maintenance. The fact that Hacker Search is no longer unique makes that maintenance no longer worth it. It's time to sayfrom hackersearch.net
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- ADA discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News2024 · hn.trieve.ai · ▲193
We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
I made a search engine for Hacker News2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com · ▲211I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · ▲520Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
- SHSearch HN for interesting comment sections2024 · searchhacker.news · ▲60
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
