Google search with site:news.ycombinator.com (and optionally a time limit, which I wish wasn't limited to past hour/day/week/month/year) seems consistently superior to what Algolia provides.
Algolia is YC company, so I assume that's the main reason it's being used. But that it does such an awful job with such a simply structured site isn't compelling.
Hey latch, I've been working on the Algolia-based HN search and would love to improve it to provide you with a better search experience.
Do you think about any specific improvements? Would you mind sharing with us some non-working queries? We can follow-up here and you can also open issues on https://github.com/algolia/hn-search
I have just retested and the problem I mentioned before doesn't exist anymore, It has happened around Christmas time, back then, the search returned not very relevant results, Now it shows at the 9th position what google shows at 1th (exactly the article I was searching back then, still as first match on google), but this is a minor difference of order of the first page so I have to say the search is working pretty as expected now. Sorry for not retesting it before making that comment and thanks for keeping the search good.
:all right I didn't want to say it but there: russia hypersonic
Thanks for sharing, this is a good example where the first 2 hits on Algolia have a "better" textual relevancy (proximity between words is better, because of the "-based" word in the middle) but where the 3rd hit is most probably the one we want to see first because it has more than 100 points while the 2 others have 3.
Let me share that to the team and see whether we can try something.
Algolia is YC company, so I assume that's the main reason it's being used. But that it does such an awful job with such a simply structured site isn't compelling.