Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception

  • Many commenters find the tool “very cool,” useful, and fun to explore.
  • Several say they had been wanting exactly this for HN, or compare it favorably to Google Trends / Ngram–style tools.
  • A few find it underwhelming while search is disabled or data is incomplete and say they’ll revisit later.

Data sources & alternatives

  • The HN archive is described as highly valuable; links shared to the official Firebase API, a Hugging Face dataset, and a public ClickHouse database mirroring HN.
  • Some note the project effectively acts as a specialized search/insight engine over HN content.

Technical issues and performance

  • The site repeatedly suffers from “hug of death”: timeouts, 502/504 errors, and rate-limits from the backing Upstash Redis Search.
  • At times, data after 2019 disappears, “Who is Hiring?” graphs show no data, and certain queries fail or misbehave.

Feature requests & UX feedback

  • Common requests:
    • Normalize trends by total HN volume / comment count over time.
    • Full-height / fullscreen charts and consistent color mapping between thumbnails and main graphs.
    • Click-through from a spike to the corresponding HN front page date.
    • Filters for “Show HN,” “Who is Hiring?”, companies, or categories.
    • Better handling of multi-word queries and newly indexed words.
  • Some report broken scrolling and confusing or missing data for specific examples.

Ambiguity, search behavior & AI ideas

  • Ambiguous terms (e.g., “atom,” “go,” “grunt,” “Fastly,” “C#”) can mislead trends.
  • There’s debate over automatic synonym grouping vs. strict literal search; some want AI-powered categories, others strongly prefer explicit operators and opt-outs.
  • Suggestions include:
    • Sentiment analysis over people/companies and trends in positive vs. negative sentiment.
    • Embedding-based indexing to disambiguate topics.
    • Automatic discovery of emerging trends without specifying keywords.

Legal and licensing debate

  • A side discussion questions whether republishing HN data (e.g., via public datasets) is allowed under HN’s terms.
  • Commenters dispute whether the API / dataset licensing covers the content itself; outcome remains unresolved in the thread.