The Hacker News social news website, which allows users to submit links and discuss cutting-edge developments in technology, has a subpar search functionality that fails to find relevant results, particularly for more recent stories. However, the platform's community-driven nature and the availability of open tools like Vectara have led to several projects aimed at improving the search experience. The author built a new search interface using Vectara's retrieval engine, which provides better results by leveraging semantic search and a powerful embedding model, allowing users to discover more recent and on-topic content.