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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on a HN-esque design for a non HN site and had taken a similar approach with using favicons as this variant does. I think the icons really help and also assist with identification (of, say, TechCrunch articles.. whether you do or don't want to read them). What do people make of their use in this project?

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I don't like 'em in this usage, because imo they just add to the Matthew Effect of recognized stuff getting more recognized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect_(sociology)). I'd personally prefer an option to completely filter out domains I don't want results from, and then no visual differentiation among the rest.

How do you resolve favicons? Browsers are very resilient at finding favicons. Websites can use meta refreshes, variants on <link rel="..."> tags, domain.com/favicon.{ico,png}, gzipped images, and inserting icon elements with javascript. You could also use parent domains if you don't have a favicon for a subdomain.

Writing your own favicon-getter is by contrast... kind of annoying.

It's using http://getfavicon.appspot.com/. I assume (by the names of the creators) that it wasn't created specifically for this.

It seems when the URL of a post has a hash at the end, the default icon query string isn't used.

http://i.imgur.com/pBs2T.png

FWIW, you can use google's favicon "service". It isn't official, but as long as you don't hit it too hard, I doubt they mind terribly:

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=techcrunch.com

EDIT: I should point out that the accuracy is poor compared to most browsers.

I love them! It helps with scanning the front page. Due to the location/fact that it is text/text colour I never look at the URL of an article when looking at the front page on news.ycombinator.com.

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