Hacker News Reader

Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

Why not skip the middleman and go directly to wikipedia or reddit?

Reddit/Wikipedia search are an order of magnitude worse than Google

I don't know about Reddit, but for Wikipedia I just write a guess for the title of the article I'm looking for, and if I'm not redirected to the proper title of the article, then I'm normally sent to a disambiguation page. I've never found myself in need of something like Google for Wikipedia.

That works if you know the article you want, but for something more abstract wiki search is terrible

I just came up with this example on the spot, searching wikipedia for "inventor of paracetamol", the first result on wiki search is "Polymorphism", then "Diphenhydramine", then "List of Suicides", then "Menstruation"

Searching google for "inventor of paracetamol wiki" links to the wikipedia Paracetamol page subsection History

Oh, indeed. I think Wiki's search is based on just the titles and probably their redirection aliases, not the article bodies.

Wikipedia search works well for me. The site search is exhaustive, returning every single page matching the query. For topics in the news recently, all changes are propagated to Wikipedia's search index immediately, while Google takes longer to recognize changes.

I find Google’s search on Reddit to be much better than Reddit’s.

IDK about Wikipedia, but Reddit's builtin search sucks. Google is better.

Try using Wikipedia through Mac's Dictionary app. I never touch my browser for that anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com