SearchYC

» see searchyc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 31 December 2007 a developer named Mike Cheng posted a link to Hacker News titled "Something new for the New Year: SearchYC.com". The site did one thing. Hacker News at that point had no search of any kind, so finding a thread you half remembered meant paging back through the archive by hand or hoping Google had indexed the right page. SearchYC indexed the submissions and the comments underneath them, let you sort by date or by points, and gave you a way to pull up everything a single user had ever written.

It grew the way a side project grows. SearchYC 2.0 landed in April 2008 and a Firefox search plugin followed a week later. Saved queries turned into RSS feeds, there was an archive of Ask YC threads, and a Best of Hacker News page ranked the most discussed stories the forum had produced. When that page went up, Paul Graham turned up in the thread to point out that links to his own essays were skewing the comment counts.

Cheng announced the end on 27 June 2011. After three and a half years, he wrote, SearchYC was obsolete: ThriftDB, built by the people behind Octopart, had shipped HNSearch for the same community, and he was leaving to write iOS software for the automotive industry. The site would go offline at the end of the month. The farewell took 303 points, which beat every release he had ever posted.

By 2008 I had TTNet broadband at home in Turkey and the boards I read were Turkish hardware forums, not Hacker News, so the site itself was never mine. The problem it solved was familiar anyway. Forum software of that era shipped a search box that returned nothing useful, and everyone learned to search the board through Google instead. Nobody on those forums went off and built the replacement. Here one person did, for free, for a website that belonged to someone else.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cable modem ~

On 1 June 2011 a story called "Comcast Decided To Shut Down SearchYC" reached the front page with 94 points. The search engine the whole forum relied on had been served from a residential Comcast connection in Cheng's home, which the terms of that account forbid, and Comcast had finally noticed. The thread fills up with readers offering to move it: a Linode account, a prgmr box, somebody's unused EC2 credits. One commenter asked what kind of traffic the thing was actually pulling if a forty dollar a month Linode would not cover it.

Three weeks later Cheng retired it instead. The hosting was never really the problem.

~ what pg actually said ~

In May 2010 somebody opened an Ask HN thread about why the site had no search, and Paul Graham answered in it: "The reason I wouldn't add a link to SearchYC is the same that I don't add a link to one of the HN iPhone apps: I don't know the authors or the app well enough to anoint it as official. I don't mind if people want to build stuff on top of HN, but I have a much higher threshold for making something part of HN." The position was consistent rather than hostile, and the official search box did not arrive for another four years.

~ three engines in a row ~

What replaced SearchYC did not last much longer. HNSearch, the ThriftDB showcase from Octopart, carried the archive from 2011 until a story on 15 March 2014 announced it would be switched off later that same day. Algolia had taken over by then, and the search box built into Hacker News today is still theirs. Three operators in seven years, and not one of them was Y Combinator.

The domain went through the usual decay afterwards. The Tumblr page carrying the farewell letter sat on searchyc.com until the server was reset in March 2012 and started answering with a default Apache "It works!" page. By January 2013 the archive crawler was getting a Cloudflare error instead, and by January 2014 the title tag read "searchyc.com - This website is for sale!". Today the name has no DNS record at all.

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