HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do I search through pages linked from HN?

1 points by qwerty456127 ↗ HN
Most of the posts here on HN are links to pages on other web sites. How do I find pages featuring particular words among these?

E.g. I'd like to find an article on digital signal and processing which probably had the words like "signal" and "filter" in its text but all I can remember about the title used on HN is that it probably didn't feature either.

9 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 23.7 ms ] thread
caryd
You'd have to use a crawler or make a basic one to curl and grep
qwerty456127
It's just hard to believe nobody has made one yet.
microtonic1
well I started to build one with proxycrawl some months ago but I got busy and couldn't finish it. I should publish the source on github so others can finish it
29athrowaway
Put this in Google, and see how it goes:

    signal filter "http://" site:news.ycombinator.com
You will need some variations, like including "https://", but this is a good start.
qwerty456127
Doesn't this only search through titles and commentaries? What I am looking for is NOT under the news.ycombinator.com domain.

For example lets open the main page, there is a "Microplastics found in 93% of bottled water tested in global study" title on it. Click on it and you'll get to the https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/bottled-water-microplasti... page. Within the article text it mentions "major national brands across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas". In this example I would like to search for "Africa" (which is not mentioned in the commentaries) and find this article as one of articles posted on HN and mentioning Africa.

DoreenMichele
The search feature on HN offers custom options for a variety of metrics.

One tactic I use is to search on words in some comment I left in the discussion. If I search on my HN name, words I probably don't use overly much and check comments, I can frequently find it.

Sometimes, fiddling with the time frame helps. If I have some hand wavy idea of when I read it and not enough other info, I will resort to playing with that element of the search engine.

It's tedious, but sometimes results in successfully finding what I was looking for.

qwerty456127
I have not commented anything that time. And I can't remember if it was 3 or much more months ago. I'll get too much of irrelevant comments if I search for "signal" or "filter" in comments on HN.
DoreenMichele
Then let me suggest as an alternative you give a description here of what you recall and see if you can get lucky and have someone go "That sounds like this link".
qwerty456127
It described some signal processing/filtering science I've never heard of before :-)

I've always wished HN had tags...