I put this together quickly to search yc sites with google cse and found it helpful after using it for a few weeks. In response to discussions at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30912, I hope you will find it useful until pg implemented the search feature.

Nice. I like how it searches the text of the links instead of just the titles and comments.

plug this into a google search:

foo site:news.ycombinator.com

Most site's search features honk. I use this all the time.

For some reason, Google doesn't index a lot of the older stuff. I can no longer find some links that I was able to find on news.yc using this technique a month ago. IMHO, PG should at least make the site easy to crawl for Google, or add his own search feature.

You're about three months late: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780

I wasn't aware of the search feature the Big Head Labs hacked together until recently. Unlike the work Jason has done, ycsearch.com has absolutely no technical achievements (on my part). I spent 30 minutes to put it together because I want to use it. ycsearch.com does provide a different set of results since Google cse will crawl all ycombinator.com and also partial external sites news.yc link to.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30919 points out that it is quite a bit behind in indexing news.yc posts.

but he owns a memorable domain and I don't use bookmarks that much for some reason.

After I wrote this comment, I deleted it...