What... wait what.... There is an official API and no one told ... what?

Ok, I'm seriously scraping, and I seriously dislike it, sound like HackerSwifter will now use the API! Thanks!

Edit: But there is no endpoint to have the top items, ask hn etc... right?

Work is underway on an API to do all of this. Nick and Scott are hacking on it about three feet to my right just now. The days of scraping are numbered.

This is awesome. So it'll be a new API or an extension of the Algolia API?

The former.

Great news!

Last Show HN: http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,show_...

Last Ask HN: http://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,ask_h...

Front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

You should be able to build something :)

Octopart initially provided the official API[1] and then Algolia took over early this year[2].

[1] https://www.hnsearch.com/api [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7130590

A lot of people seem to have used the API to build cool apps.

https://hn.algolia.io/cool_apps

I would read the docs first and jump to conclusions later.

YCombinator doesn't endorse Algolia's HN API in any public way, to my knowledge. This makes it just regular third-party API—reliable, convenient, better than scraping, but hardly ‘official’. (Yes, I'm being pedantic.)

It seems to in the sense that Algolia powers the HN Search at the bottom of every window, and they are co-branded on those search pages. Also, https://hn.algolia.com/api

True that, I take back my comment.

How is that official? I thought that was Algolia's API, not YC's

Algolia is a YC company and built the API for YC, which is as official as it gets.

would certainly be a lot less confusing if the api was actually hosted on the same domain.

as-in: news.ycombinator.com/api

or something...

When I search for "news.ycombinator api" I get a bunch of irrelevant or very outdated links...

https://www.google.com/#q=news.ycombinator+api

I agree, but it's good marketing. It associates the act of searching with the hostname 'algolia', which seems to be in their interest (being that their tagline is "Hosted cloud search as a service | AlgoliaSearch").