ProductHunt is great, but there is a problem…

Spoiler: Searching for URLs is broken.

Let’s say I am looking for a specific product on ProductHunt. The best way to go directly to something on the internet, is type in the URL.

But searching for URLs is completely broken on ProductHunt.

For example I want to find a travel planning app Wanderlog on the site.

Wanderlog: best free travel itinerary & road trip planner app

I can search by name, but for apps that have common names like for example Notion, the question is, which, if any, of these results is the real one?

The best way to find the specific product is to search the URL.

But that doesn’t work. And I don’t mean, it doesn’t work well. I mean it doesn’t work at all.

We can try searching for the human readable url wanderlog.com. We get… nothing…

Let’s add on the www… nothing

Full https… nothing

Which makes zero sense, since Wanderlog is clearly on the site and the URL that ProductHunt sents you to is the URL I was searching.

They have the URL in the database. I just can’t use it as a search input which makes it hard.

Solution — Search URLs

I would love to be able to type https://wanderlog.com/ into the search bar and see this.