I made a search engine for Hacker News
I 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.
I made a search engine for Hacker News launched on July 2, 2024 with 211 votes, #260 of 5,184 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
This is an alternative search engine for Hacker News that indexes approximately six months of stories and comments. Built by someone at Vectara, it addresses perceived limitations in the existing Algolia-powered search. The tool is designed for Hacker News users who want a different search experience and is intended to gather feedback on its usefulness compared to the current search functionality.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Use Vectara for conversational search
Does a similar job
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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…
- 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…
Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News2024 · hackersearch.net · ▲233Hi 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…
Hndex.org – a full-text search engine of articles submitted to HN2020 · hndex.org · ▲442- 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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