Members of the Handshake community are always developing new things to further the ecosystem. One such member created the search engine HNSSearch which indexes websites built on Handshake names. This tool has been around for a few months but it was pretty bare-bones. Some sites were indexed but most had to be individually requested by filling out a Google Form. I actually submitted nic.p101 to be indexed but the developers were busy and never got around to it …
But for good reason! A few weeks ago HNSSearch underwent a huge overhaul, marking the new update as version 2.0. The new layout is much sleeker and searches for pages dynamically as you type your search term.
As of right now most of the indexed sites are proxies of Tumblr pages but there are a few others such as the Network Information Center that show up when you refine your search terms (i.e. “p101 nic” instead of “p101”). I don’t have any control over which sites get indexed or the order in which they appear, but the fact that there is a protocol-wide search engine is just the start of great things to come.
To learn more about HNSSearch v2 you can read the blog post that the creator wrote on Medium or go to the website itself at http://hnssearch/. For those of you who are not yet resolving Handshake domains, use https://handshakesearch.hns.siasky.net/ and make sure to click the “Use Gateway (hns.to)” slider at the top right.