Little known fact: SearchYC does instant search if you add &instant=true to the URL: http://searchyc.com/hacker+news?sort=by_date&instant=tru...

It's not enabled by default because it's not as useful without autocomplete.

Awesome, did not know that. Would be cool if you all made this default when you get SearchYC back up and running.

I thought you were shutdown by Comcast, nice to see you're back

It is still down here.

It's been a rough week. Hopefully things will return to normal once DNS propagates.

"Abandonware" may be a bit extreme. How would you change SearchYC?

More than one request has been made to get quoted strings in queries, which would be very useful, without any feedback from developers. The website is still there, however it seems the developer have dumped the code and forgot about it.

You just responded to the developer.

I use SearchYC all the time; it works great.

I agree quoted strings in queries would be nice. There are some technical challenges in handling mixed queries where some terms are quoted and others are not, though.

Gosh, Her Majesty The Developer! Er... th-thanks for a-answering...

;-)))))

Jokes aside, thank you very much for developing SearchYC and making it available.

What would you think about adding a FAQ section where - among other things - you explain the "quoting issue" has indeed been considered, but dismissed because of difficult implementation? I guess every web-surfer has got used to quoting in searches, therefore not having it leaves him baffled.

Cheers.

Those comments were cached when comment scores were turned off 10 months ago. It's strange that they haven't been updated since then.

HN handles considerably more traffic than SearchYC.

Well, that's a difficult one: Either PG is right and nobody needs search, then we'll find it doesn't matter, or I'm right and we do need search and then the searchyc guys will need to beef up their system.

But then at least we do know for sure we need that search.

As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.

If you got a lot more traffic because YC would anoint you the 'official' YC search engine would you be able to handle it?

Would you commit to beefing up the system to whatever it took?

Well, no. SearchYC has no revenue. I maintain SearchYC and host it out of a box in my closet as a service to the community. It doesn't make any sense for me to commit to do "whatever it takes".

That being said, with a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and some software changes, SearchYC should be able to gracefully handle a couple orders of magnitude more traffic.

Consider yourself funded if it should come to that.

Not unless pg replies to this with "Please stop".

I wonder if the FTC is scratching their heads wondering what to do about Apple product rumors.

SearchYC doesn't scrape the user pages containing the account creation date. We could generate numbers based on days since the user's first post, though.

I just moved the box from Cupertino to Palo Alto. Should be up now.

Oops, just restarted the server. Incidentally, the server will be down at some point in the coming few days because I'm moving.