With Reddit and HackerNews, I want a relative ranking index. I can search by the top content, but something 5th today could have more votes than the top submission of 2015 because of forum/subreddit growth.
I want them ranked by something like the ratio of views to upvotes or upvotes compared to total upvotes for that day.
Yeah, this is definitely possible with public data. I did something similar on reveddit [1] for removed reddit content. Hovering over the graph shows the item with the highest vote ratio [3], and clicking skips to that point in time. Code is here [2] for anyone interested and I apologize in advance..
[1] https://i.imgur.com/p3Bi5IS.png
[2] https://github.com/reveddit/ragger/blob/master/revddit_aggre...
I believe HN's ranking system is extremely creative and works great for the main page and day-to-day use (my understanding is that it additionally makes use of time-decay terms for comments and stories). Like you said, it's really just historical search (i.e. algolia) that seems broken.
https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15709405
https://www.evanmiller.org/bayesian-average-ratings.html
https://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.h...
https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin...
Work in progress: