Ask HN: How does HN's Algolia search by popularity work?

2 points

10 years ago

While trying to find an article via HN's Algolia search (and failing at it), I started to do a broader-term search on Stories only, filtering by Popularity and Past Month.

I did several searches like this without finding what I wanted until I started scanning results a bit closer and found that sometimes Stories are listed without any order relative to popularity (which I assume is upvote count).

For example, searching for just the term "error" with the previous filters, I get the following three results (shown in order of appearance):

https://imgur.com/GgrH6UK

- Elon Musk Teases Second Part of ‘Top Secret Tesla Masterplan’

  3 points  Errorcod3  8 days ago  2 comments  (https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/11/elon-musk-teases-second-part-of-top-secret-tesla-masterplan/)

- Here comes the Pokémon Go malware

  1 points  Errorcod3  8 days ago  0 comments  (https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/11/here-comes-the-pokemon-go-malware/)

- Errol Morris's Secret Weapon for Unsettling Interviews: The Interrotron

  141 points  prawn  8 days ago  42 comments  (http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663105/errol-morriss-secret-weapon-for-unsettling-interviews-the-interrotron)

If you look closely, the last story has 141 points, and even though they were all submitted 8 days ago, it shows stories with 3 and 1 points first.

So now I am having doubts about how can I trust that the result order is really correct?

Is there anything else going on here related to the "Popularity" filter metric? is it maybe something other than upvotes? It just strikes me as very odd that a story that is clearly popular (141 upvotes, 42 comments) is rated lower than stories with 3 and 1 upvotes and 2 and 0 comments respectively.

I'm sure the search engine works fine, so it's probably my lack of knowledge on how to fully use it. Are there any guides on how to do good searches on Algolia?

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