We now finally have search for HN, thanks to Octopart, who’ve been working on it for a while as a test of their new search database, ThriftDB. You’ll see a searchbox at the bottom of most pages.

ThriftDB is the software they had to write to do Octopart’s electronic parts searches; no existing software was up to the task. They solved the problem in as general way as possible, producing something that will work for many different types of sites that need search.

Sorry this took so long. For a while we hoped to implement our own search, but it became apparent that would take a lot of work to do right. So we were delighted when Octopart decided to get into the search as a service business. Since this was the first search app they built outside of Octopartitself, it took quite a while. This is just the first versionso it may not yet do everything users want, but it seems pretty good.