That is probably one of the sites I hit on a daily basis coz invariably I am looking for an opinion, and HN is probably a good place to start, be it books, music, a startup in a particular sector of the market.
Searching searchyc.com for common single-words has improved greatly. Searching for "startup" previously took more than 30 seconds. However, you're still slower than http://y.soho.lt/ for multi-word searches.
We're running on very limited resources. But the good thing is we can now throw hardware at the problem (if we had the money to do so) and performance would improve. I couldn't say that with the old system.
http://y.soho.lt/ is not a wrapper. It is 8KB of web services with data held locally which is a proof-of-concept for a larger search system. http://y.soho.lt/ also runs on limited resources, namely virtual hosting. Furthermore, we were indexing slowly over the past 30 days and therefore a full index wasn't collected until this morning. A complete and current index will be public from Sunday onwards.
They may be slower, but they return more results. Also, the interface is better -- I don't want to have to go to News.YC to see the context of the result.
I expect something called SearchYC to be the authority on finding things at YC. Pointing me to google when you find no results should be useless and detracts from that authority.
That's all the critique I can come up with though, looks great.
Very handy, and an improvement on how I remember it.
It would be nice to be able to search for "that post foo made to which bar replied". Often you remember the structure of the conversation rather than a unique word or two.
Thanks guys! Really appreciate the good work.