Adding "site:news.ycombinator.com" to the search string in a google search works for me....

Other search engines are available.

This topic comes up quite a bit. This is what I use:

http://searchyc.com/

An in-site search feature wouldn't be a bad idea, though...

I totally agree with you. For a hacker site like this, the absence of built-in search feature is something outrageous.

Sometimes I just want to check whether the story/news has been submitted or not. Doing this on Google is really frustrating and can lead me to the wrong result. So don't blame for any duplicated stories sent by me.

That's been requested a few times already. Normally I'd grumpily write "search the archives before posting feature requests", but, wel...

SearchYC can be searched quickly with the following plugin :)

http://jetfar.com/search-yc-firefox-plugin/

That's nice, but are you really having to add a browser plugin to search a site isn't a really an ideal solution is it?

It's a lot better than nothing.

Also, this is the official plugin: http://plugin.searchyc.com/