HN Explorer

Ask HN: Does 'Sort on Popularity' work fine in HackerNews search?

2 points by tom_hack ↗ HN
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=statistics%20visual&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story

When I run this search, posts with most number of points aren't appearing at the top. Results seem to appear in some random-order which I couldn't make much sense of. Could someone help me out. Thank you!

3 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] thread
brudgers
The search results depend on Aloglia's algorithms. Revising the search to "visual statistics" changes the results, suggesting that word order matters. That probably makes sense for document searches since it favors searches that are more exact.

The order of the results also expresses how Algolia handles stemming.

There's probably some more information on Algolia's site.

tom_hack
thanks for the tip. but even with 'visual statistics' as search-string, the post with most points (Brown Univ) appears somewhat later. Unless you think the first-result is the most relevant match. As for me, I found the Brown University post to be a better match than what appears at the top, currently, for 'visual statistics' search.
brudgers
The words "visual" and "statistics" are closer together in the higher ranked results. Proximity might be a useful ranking metric and YC may have chosen to tune Algolia for it or it might be the default.