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Incase someone doesn't know already: they have a HN search too! https://hn.algolia.com/

search for e.g 'microsoft' -> ~120k results

change sort by popularity to sort by date -> ~30k results

I don't really understand how sorting can affect the number of results. Btw youtube search does this too.

My guess would be that someone maintaining the main index isn’t maintaining the sorted indices. With Algolia, you have a duplicated index for each type of sort and direction that you want to support.

Yes, when sorting by date it's currently configured to disable typo-tolerance. This is to avoid having an old (but approximative, with typos) result BEFORE the correct ones.

Ah the old multi-factor sort problem. Fun figuring out how to handle those scenarios in Elastic Search too (or more generally any sorting UI). For example you want traditional Chinese food near you. What is better - traditional Chinese food 14km away or fusion 2km away? Well that depends on the wetware, but you have to guess what the user would want.

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