Best Hacker News API for search
The index is public and free, so nobody needs to sell you access. What costs a day to learn is that it answers a bad query with a full page of results instead of an error.
What to require of any vendor here
- Ask what it does with a boolean query. The index does not understand `OR`: it reads the expression as a bag of words and requires all of them. A query written as `a OR b` comes back with 200 and an empty list — the failure that looks like a real answer.
- Ask whether typo tolerance is left on. Measured: with it on, a search for `mrr` returned 81 results and none of them were about MRR. That is worse than the empty list, because a full list of noise looks healthy.
- Ask whether it searches the title only or the body too. The two answer different questions, and only one of them is about your subject.
What you are handing over
The index is Algolia's and the shape has been stable since it was first read in 2026-09-05. What you are handing over is the part that took a day to learn: that the index does not understand OR, and that with typo tolerance left on, a search for `mrr` returns 81 results and none of them about MRR.
What this does not return
- No author. The Algolia response carries `author` on every hit and it is dropped on the way out — the same decision the archiver has carried since 2026-09-06. This product measures what was posted, not who posted it.
- No comment threads. `story` returns the story and the comment COUNT, never the comment texts: one measured item carried 176 comments, each with an author and a body from someone who did not ask to be republished.
- No profile endpoint, and it is not an oversight. There is no `hackernews/profile` for the same reason there is no author field.
- No follower counts. Hacker News has no follow graph, so every author field is null rather than zero.
Our endpoints for this platform — 2
hackernews/search— Hacker News stories matching a term, with points and comments.hackernews/story— One Hacker News story by id — the story, not the comments.
Shape, parameters and the errors each one returns are in the endpoint reference, and this platform has its own page with the recorded response.
What the alternatives cost
We do not restate competitor prices here. The vendor pages carry them — 35 of them — each price read on that vendor's own page, with the date we read it. Readings run from 2026-09-05 to 2026-10-03.
A price copied into a second place is a price that will disagree with itself the first time a vendor changes one. Verify on their page before deciding — we are an interested party.
Reading Hacker News yourself is the part above. Reading it through one call is the part we sell.