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History of Hacker News Search from 2007 to 2024

The history of HackerNews (HN) search spans three generations. Starting in 2007 with Disqus founder Jason Yan followed by a series of other sites, Octopart/ThriftDB-powered HNSearch in 2011, and finally Algolia-powered search from 2014 to today.

In the text of the original post (see here), cosmok explains that he built it using Yahoo’s search API. 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. It was launched as a competition to build the best thing on top of the HNSearch API where the winner would get a 27-inch Dell monitor.

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