Algolia Hacker News Search GitHub Project Archived
github.comAlgolia DevRel here. An amazing dev named Jeff Slentz did a full rewrite about a year ago, which is what the current search runs on.
The new search is currently in a private repo, but I can see about getting it turned public if people would like to peruse the code.
OMG, I'd love to fix that date picker. It is just so horribly broken, it causes me PTSD.
I would appreciate it. It’s such a joy to use, to share, and (admitting I haven’t) nice to see & share the code & configuration to feed algolia, on a more serious scale of us than I’m likely to use in a hobby project or find/grok/share another public example with code + data.
Had me scared for a moment that it was running Ruby 2.6 and Rails 5.1.7 in prod. :'D
FYI: The hn search index I'm seeing is about 9 hours old as of 2026-02-23T00:53:00Z. Is that right?
Hmmm. Should update more often than that. Let me check!
Both HN clients that I use are failing to load/update. I think they both pull data from the Algolia search endpoints.
Thank you
Please make it public
Hmm, I've been getting "Algolia API failed" on Harmonic for the past day, was wondering what could be going on.
I've been having issues logging into my HN account on Harmonic for quite a while, now this, the API is down :/
Does this indicate a new HN search could be coming?
Doesn't seem to have been touched for 3 years. Might be they consider it complete, but given the number of issues and PRs that's been gathering in those 3 years, it feels more like it's abandoned.
They had one small ingestion issue on august 2025 https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/issues/248
Is there a place to get an archive of all HN posts and historical comments?
Check HackerBook https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook
Repo packages 20 years of Hacker News into a static archive you can run entirely in your browser. The site is just files: HTML, JSON, and gzipped SQLite shards. No server app required.
Easiest way might be to use google cloud's 'bigquery' tool which lets you query hn data with SQL
I just tried
and it returns 47049059 rows. AndSELECT * FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
gives 2026-02-21 09:12:49 UTC, so it checks out.SELECT MAX(timestamp) AS most_recent_timestamp FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`;There's a BigQuery public dataset
bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.fullThere are some data sets but Hacker News has a non rate-limited API (see the bottom of the page) so you can just build one yourself.
I don't think you can get the content of flagged posts without actually scraping the site but that'll get you banned.
Wasn't aware that this backend ran on rails.
Ruby is a sleeper for me. I wasn’t around when Ruby on Rails was all the rage for startups, so I always get surprised when I learn that so-and-so started off as a Ruby project.
But it totally makes sense considering its style.
I would like to have again possibility to sort comments by popularity.
This isn't 'archived' - it's just the source code of HN Search. And place for reporting problems, like back in August when it wasn't ingesting data briefly
The repo page says "This repository was archived by the owner on Feb 10, 2026. It is now read-only."