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Hacker News Search API (Algolia)

Full-text search over every HN story and comment, keyless and free

Algolia hosts a free full-text search layer over all public Hacker News content, indexed in near real time. It exposes search, search-by-date, and item/user lookups with numeric filters on points, comment counts, and timestamps. It is the practical companion to the Firebase API when you need querying rather than ID walking.

Free tier

Free, no key

Rate limits

~10,000 requests/hour per IP (not officially published)

Auth

No key

Base URL

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1

What you'd build with it

  • Let an agent search HN for prior discussion on a product or technology
  • Pull the top N stories above a points threshold in a date window
  • Fetch a complete comment thread by ID for summarization

Key endpoints

  • GET/searchRelevance-ranked full-text search with tags and numeric filters
  • GET/search_by_dateSame query, sorted newest-first
  • GET/items/{id}Full item with nested children (comment tree)
  • GET/users/{username}User profile and karma
Members

Members get the runnable recipe

Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.

Tags

searchnewssocialdevelopers