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Growth · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to A new search engine for finding leads

Hey folks, There has been some talk about search engines here so I thought maybe I'd share a new project I'm working on. Built it partly to help me sell my own projects. Still a lot of work to be done but would be happy to get feedback. Very early phase so don't trust your life with it. Cheers --- Edit: if anyone needs a free/no CC account just DM me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/crufter/

This is an early-stage search engine designed to help users find sales leads. Built by its creator to support their own business development efforts, it remains a work-in-progress with significant development still… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A new search engine for finding leads launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Jesse▲438

    Stop building Apollo/Clay lists. Search the live internet.

    Jun 2026 · agentjesse.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Overlead▲146

    Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…

    Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →

  3. 3FS

    Hi HN! This started late last year as an afternoon project to play around with ElasticSearch, and then I kept thinking of new features I wanted to add. I still have a lot of things I want to build, but now seemed like a good time to put it out there: even if the results aren’t nearly the quality I’d like, I’ve still found it useful and I want to show it off! I’ve been working on it since September 2021, but only in fits and starts. The entire thing runs on a computer in my living room (there’s a picture on the About page); I haven’t done any load testing so we’ll see how it holds up.

    2022 · search.feep.dev · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    I built mention.click to help founders and marketers find real business leads, feedback, and opportunities by uncovering the right discussions on Reddit, without the hassle of keyword research. Backstory I was trying to prove ideas and products, I didn't like existing tools like ReplyGuy, Gummy search, while being cool, didn't work for me. I needed a specialized solution to find conversations where I could speak about my project, driven by AI (Not really) just filtering out extra noise. How it works You give a link to the website. mention.click uses AI to extract keywords and context. It…

    2025 · mention.click · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Excited to share something I've been building recently called CandySearch. I made it to solve a personal pain with a SaaS product I built, which was that we were always monitoring Reddit and Twitter to see if anyone had mentioned keywords indicating they were looking for us. Before, we had to go manually respond to posts, often missing good mention opportunities. Would love for HN folks to try it and let me know what you think!

    2025 · candysearch.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  6. 6WU

    hey y'all -- can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks? :D we built it using an investor platform called Harmonic.ai to gather startup data, then contextualize it so that job seekers could find out about the most exciting startups hiring first (like if they just raised, growing headcount fast, have an ex-unicorn founder, etc). pretty sure we're the first platform doing anything like this. anyway, let me know what you think. really excited to launch this thing soon! getting feedback from the hn community first is really fun :)

    2022 · joinmaasive.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I was watching Deep Research do hours of research in minutes and thought why the hell am I still manually clicking through Ahrefs trying to guess what keywords to check? So I built an AI that does keyword research the same way. The problem with traditional keyword tools is they assume you already know what to look for. But I'd sit there thinking "okay I'm building a developer tool... do I search for 'API monitoring'? 'webhook debugging'? 'API testing'?" Then I'd spend an hour going down rabbit holes and miss the fact that "Postman alternative open source" or something like that gets 2k…

    2025 · jelloseo.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hey Hackers! Navigating the intricate landscape of LinkedIn prospecting alongside Sales Navigator can be quite the challenge. I've been through the trenches, investing numerous hours to contact the right prospects with the right messages. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce a tool I've developed to simplify your LinkedIn journey and streamline those repetitive, time-consuming tasks. You can check out my tool at www.getcleed.com. For anyone prospecting with Linkedin, I'd highly value your feedback on how Cleed could improve your experience. Cheers

    May 2026 · getcleed.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9IB

    Hi HN, For the last 18 months, I've been working solo on building a completely independent search engine from scratch. Today, I'm opening it up for beta testing and would love to get your feedback. The project powers two public sites from the same 2-billion-page index: Searcha.Page: A session-aware search engine that uses a persistent browser key (not a cookie) for better context. Seek.Ninja: A 100% stateless, privacy-first version with no identifiers at all. The entire stack is self-hosted on a single ~$4k bare-metal EPYC server in my laundry room (no cloud, no VC funding). The search…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Buying signals on Reddit, X & LinkedIn + 1-click replies

    Jun 2026 · celerflow.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11CA

    Based on the multiple "Who's hiring remotely?" and similar posts on HN, I thought it might be useful to have a site that aggregates remote programming jobs. There is way too much spam out and an inconsistent way to say "work from home" so traditional searching doesn't work (or rather, takes a long time per person). I've worked in a few remote programming positions so I figured I might know of some companies or searching tricks to find them. Let me know if you'd find this type of thing useful. If we can get some traffic going, then maybe we can start attracting companies to actually list…

    2010 · workfromhomeprogrammingjobs.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12AC

    Hello HN! I'm excited to share my product that helps companies to track their competitors, their website updates, new features, social media activity etc. I already have the first set of early adopters (thanks to a pretty good ProductHunt launch) who're using it on the daily basis so I'm excited to remove the waiting list and share it with everyone. Cheers!

    2023 · rivalhunt.co · its alternatives →

  13. 13IM

    AI search results are quickly becoming more important than SEO, but as businesses, we have no visibility over it! That's why I'm building "Ahrefs for AI search results". Track keyword performance on AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity & more

    2025 · linrush.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14WS

    Hi HN, We are building a search engine to help founders, investors, and early adopters to easily discover startups from all over the world. Discovering startups - whether it is a potential competitor, to validate an idea or as part of a DD process - is a difficult and time-consuming process. We believe that many existing platforms require expensive subscriptions and general-purpose search engines often do not give a complete enough picture. To solve this problem, we are releasing a free-to-use search engine (with a relatively generous daily limit on search volume). No sign-up is required. We…

    2023 · symonda.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN, I am a Researcher,Inventor,Software Developmer,IOT Designer. And searching has been very frustrating and time consuming task for me. As I have too many things to be done searching became a hurdle to me cause its not simple its very frustrating still no guarantee will I get what I want or not. My experience with Search Engine and ChatBot AI was never good most of my time just went on trying every google dork and every prompt just so it get what I want but still got nothing, so I thought my stuff isn't there on any online website. In order to atleast get something I tried to go on…

    Oct 2025 · seeknwander.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16IM

    Hey everyone! I wanted to share a tool I built to help you quickly find potential customers across social media for your product. It's a really simple concept: you simply paste in your landing page URL, and it shows you highly relevant posts across Reddit (Working to integrate few more) from people who likely need your product or service. For example, if you have a minimal to-do list app, it will show you posts like "Anyone know of a minimal to-do list app?" or "Really starting to dislike how complex Notion is." These posts are from the last 48 hours, updated in real-time, and uniquely…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  17. 17TF

    Searching for job roles in tech? I've been there. For six months, I was stuck in the LinkedIn job application loop, getting nowhere. It was soul-crushing. I started to wonder if I was just a bad developer. But I changed my modus operandi and started reaching out to founders building super cool startups that got recently funded but didnt have the chance to post online yet that they are hiring, the response rate was much more significant and I wwas having super cool convos! This approach was so effective, I turned it into a product. I've tapped into premium data sources (we're talking $25K+…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  18. 18IB

    Hey HN, I've just begun my solopreneur journey. I've been a "serial starter" - often starting projects and never seeing them through, and I have finally finished my first project! Maybe this sentiment resonants with some of you, let me know in the comments below I built this tool as a simple no-risk method for turning more visitors into customers by A/B testing your sale promotions and automatically displaying the promotion with the highest conversion rate. Did you know that increasing your conversion rate by just half a percent can have a dramatic impact on your sales without needing…

    2024 · smartsalebanner.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN, I’m pleased to release my “surf engine” to the public for you to try. This is might be for you if you’ve grown frustrated with commercialised SERPs, and want to find the other websites are (still) out there. Kudos to Marginalia Search for showing that it’s possible to build a search engine as a hobbyist: https://search.marginalia.nu/ Feedback of all kinds very welcome! Ali

    2022 · highbrow.se · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    So I've been obsessed with a weird question for the past 6 months, what happens to SEO when everyone starts asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling? The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity? I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly. It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it…

    Dec 2025 · firstclick.so · its alternatives →

  21. 21KY

    Hey HN I built a free AI SEO app called seoby.ai. I'm launching it on ProductHunt, Reddit and a few other places on Monday (19th February). It's 100% free, and has some pretty neat tools: 1. AI Content Detector: Find out if your content was written by a human or generated by AI. 2. AI Outline Generator: Remove writer's block and generate SEO-friendly outlines for your articles, blog posts, and landing pages. 3. AI SEO Topic Cluster Generator: Generate SEO-optimized topic clusters for your website and get better search engine visibility. I would love feedback/ideas/suggestions of…

    2024 · seoby.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi HN, I built Leado because I kept noticing something strange while manually browsing Reddit: people were constantly asking for recommendations, comparing tools, and describing problems that matched exactly what many founders and indie hackers are building. The opportunity was real, but the visibility was horrible. Most of these posts only stay “hot” for a short window, and by the time you find them, someone else has already replied or the moment has passed. So I created an agent that: • watches selected subreddits in real time • detects buying-intent patterns (recommendation posts, tool…

    Nov 2025 · leado.co · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Stop guessing what to build. Find real demand.

    Jul 2026 · businesshunterclub.com · its alternatives →

  24. 241R

    I wanted to find a product idea to build. "Build things people want," right? So I thought, why not literally find people saying what they want? I wrote a script to collect thousands of Reddit posts where people are looking for a solution or complaining about a problem. Then I used GPT to filter out the noise and score each one based on how viable the idea seemed. Threw together a simple search interface so anyone can explore them. I was planning to build a more advanced paid version of this, but figured I'd share the raw version first to see if it's actually useful to anyone.

    Nov 2025 · search.reddit-business-ideas.workers.dev · its alternatives →

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