<story><title>Ask PG: What&apos;s the deal with search on HN?</title><text>Hello Paul,&lt;p&gt;What is the deal with search on HN?&lt;p&gt;There isn&apos;t a week or some new HN member posts a question about how to search HN, most of the time they are either confused about why there is no search on the site, in other cases they are trying to find some article and can&apos;t locate it.&lt;p&gt;The various fixes (google using the site: prefix and pointers to searchyc.com) have been repeated so often that I suspect some users have programmed function keys to save on the typing :)&lt;p&gt;I see that news.ycombinator.com promotes &apos;webmynd&apos; as a search facility, however when compared to either google or searchyc it comes up short.&lt;p&gt;I appreciate you sticking up for the companies that YC funds, and of course this is your site and you can do with it as you please but what confuses me is that there seems to be no net benefit to webmynd from being listed on YC, whereas there is a significant loss for those that use news.ycombinator and that don&apos;t have an easy way to search the site. It makes news.ycombinator look less professional and it confuses people with some regularity.&lt;p&gt;Why won&apos;t you add a box that submits a google site search or a search on searchyc to HN?&lt;p&gt;Either that or ask the webmynd guys to get their act together and create something that is on par with searchyc, they seem to be able to get it to work, and for free and &apos;unfunded&apos; no less.&lt;p&gt;If anything you could throw them a bone and show some appreciation for the work they&apos;ve done supplying a missing feature at essentially no cost to HN. Or is there bad blood between news.ycombinator and searchyc that I&apos;m not aware of?&lt;p&gt;Fred has indicated many times that he spoke to you about this, but so far I can&apos;t really make soup out of your position, after all, I take it that you want HN to be the best possible site for your users.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>The explanation is a lot less involved than your question: what makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments.  So I focus on the latter instead of the former.  The result is a spartan site with good content.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a YC funded startup that may solve the problem.  If they do I&apos;ll use them.  But frankly the issue is not at the top of my list.  This is a classic example of how one should give users what they want, not what they say they want.  Lots of people &lt;i&gt;say&lt;/i&gt; they want search, but I would be suprised if there was a single user who&apos;d left HN because it lacked search.  Whereas if I let the frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly.  So almost all the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>credo</author><text>&amp;#62;&amp;#62; I would be suprised if there was a single user who&apos;d left HN because it lacked search.&lt;p&gt;While I agree with you, I think you&apos;re looking at it the wrong way. No user will leave HN because of search-issues, but a lot of users will be very &lt;i&gt;happy&lt;/i&gt; if the site had good search.&lt;p&gt;imo it makes sense to do a trivial thing and make a lot of users happy. So while you&apos;re correct in saying that &quot;quality of the submissions and comments&quot; are more important, I see no reason why quality of content should preclude a decent search feature.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask PG: What&apos;s the deal with search on HN?</title><text>Hello Paul,&lt;p&gt;What is the deal with search on HN?&lt;p&gt;There isn&apos;t a week or some new HN member posts a question about how to search HN, most of the time they are either confused about why there is no search on the site, in other cases they are trying to find some article and can&apos;t locate it.&lt;p&gt;The various fixes (google using the site: prefix and pointers to searchyc.com) have been repeated so often that I suspect some users have programmed function keys to save on the typing :)&lt;p&gt;I see that news.ycombinator.com promotes &apos;webmynd&apos; as a search facility, however when compared to either google or searchyc it comes up short.&lt;p&gt;I appreciate you sticking up for the companies that YC funds, and of course this is your site and you can do with it as you please but what confuses me is that there seems to be no net benefit to webmynd from being listed on YC, whereas there is a significant loss for those that use news.ycombinator and that don&apos;t have an easy way to search the site. It makes news.ycombinator look less professional and it confuses people with some regularity.&lt;p&gt;Why won&apos;t you add a box that submits a google site search or a search on searchyc to HN?&lt;p&gt;Either that or ask the webmynd guys to get their act together and create something that is on par with searchyc, they seem to be able to get it to work, and for free and &apos;unfunded&apos; no less.&lt;p&gt;If anything you could throw them a bone and show some appreciation for the work they&apos;ve done supplying a missing feature at essentially no cost to HN. Or is there bad blood between news.ycombinator and searchyc that I&apos;m not aware of?&lt;p&gt;Fred has indicated many times that he spoke to you about this, but so far I can&apos;t really make soup out of your position, after all, I take it that you want HN to be the best possible site for your users.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>The explanation is a lot less involved than your question: what makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments.  So I focus on the latter instead of the former.  The result is a spartan site with good content.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a YC funded startup that may solve the problem.  If they do I&apos;ll use them.  But frankly the issue is not at the top of my list.  This is a classic example of how one should give users what they want, not what they say they want.  Lots of people &lt;i&gt;say&lt;/i&gt; they want search, but I would be suprised if there was a single user who&apos;d left HN because it lacked search.  Whereas if I let the frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly.  So almost all the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnrob</author><text>How about adding this to the header or footer?&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;a href=&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com&amp;#62&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com&amp;#62&lt;/a&gt;; Search&amp;#60;/a&amp;#62;</text></comment>