Pardon me and I don't want to come off as ignorant, what is the big deal with this? I have been using Google to search hackernews articles by querying `<subject> site:news.ycombinator.com` and it has worked wonders.

Since hackernews is all publicly available, Googlebots must have indexed every single page of this site. And we all know how good Google has been with ranking and relevance. Why did HN decide to reinvent the wheel? Why didn't HN use the Google Custom Search plugin?

(I am just curious to know and not criticizing.)