nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to An Embedding-Based Search Service over ShowHN, AskHN, GitHub, More

Hey folks, Elias here. Excited to unveil my latest project. Why I Built This: Traditional keyword search isn't cutting it. I've used LLM-embeddings to provide more nuanced, relevant results. How It Works: LLM-embedding similarity on curated datasets for semantically similar results. No need to iterate over keywords any more. Current Datasets: - YC Companies - Show HN Posts, - Ask HN Posts - ProductHunt Startups - Github Top 200k Repos Use Cases: - Validate a product idea's existence - Check if someone already Asked HN something - Have fun - search random terms and see what pops up Want to…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. An Embedding-Based Search Service over ShowHN, AskHN, GitHub, More launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    End-to-end deep dive of the project, spanning a large GPU cluster, distributed RocksDB, and terabytes of sharded HNSW.

    2025 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...

    2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3IM

    As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…

    2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    We built Valohai LLM for tracking and comparing LLM evaluation results. Whether your evals live in notebooks and spreadsheets, or you're using an observability tool that wasn't built for comparison, this gives you a purpose-built eval comparison dashboard. Run evals with a Python library (pip install valohai-llm), results stream in, and you can compare up to 6 configurations side by side. Group by any dimension (model, category, difficulty) to see where each model excels. It doesn't do tracing or production observability, for now just eval tracking and comparison. What's cool is that you can…

    2020 · valohai.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN, I’m a co‑founder of Embeddable AI. After struggling to add interactive AI experiences to Wix, Shopify, Webflow, WordPress sites, I built this tool to let marketers build chatbots, quizzes or assistants and embed them anywhere with a snippet. Built in React/TypeScript front end and Node.js logic engine. It loads fast and works across CMS platforms. I’d love feedback from builders and marketers on use cases, missing features, or integration ideas.

    2025 · embeddable.co · its alternatives →

  6. 6AD

    We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…

    2024 · hn.trieve.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7AT

    Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hi HN, I am Jiayuan, and I'm here to introduce a tool we've been building over the past few months: Devv (https://devv.ai). In simple terms, it is an AI-powered search engine specifically designed for developers. Now, you might ask, with so many AI search engines already available—Perplexity, You.com, Phind, and several open-source projects—why do we need another one? We all know that Generative Search Engines are built on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)[1] combined with Large Language Models (LLMs). Most of the products mentioned above use indexes from general search engines…

    2024 · devv.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I've built an advanced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline from scratch to demystify the complex mechanics of modern LLM-powered Question Answering systems. This repository features: -- An implementation of a sub-question query engine from scratch to answer complex user questions. -- Illustrative explanations that unveil the inner workings of the system. -- An analysis of the challenges I faced while working with the system, like prompt engineering and cost estimation. -- Qualitative comparison with similar frameworks like LlamaIndex, offering a broader perspective. Key Takeaway:…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Improved vector search with open-source AI embeddings editor

    2023 · its alternatives →

  11. 11IM

    When your embedding provider is good, but could be better for your use-case.

    2024 · zoplabs.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12IB

    Hi there! When Supabase announced their recent hackathon, I thought it was a good time to build something to learn more about so many of the new AI models and tech out there. From the different techniques of embedding documents to the future RAG. With the rise of short form content with TikTok and Youtube. A lot more knowledge is in videos than ever before. Finding specific answers within millions of videos can be difficult for any one person to go through. So the question is if there is Google that indexes text on website making it easier to find based on the context of on your question,…

    2023 · avse.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Trails▲81

    Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…

    Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    We’ve recently open-sourced Model2vec, a method to distill sentence transformers into static embeddings that outperform all previous approaches by a large margin on MTEB. Our new models set a new state-of-the-art for static embeddings. Main features: - Our best model (potion-base-8M) has only 8M parameters, which is ~30mb on disk - Inference is ~500x faster than the distilled base model (bge-base), on a CPU - New models can be distilled in 30 seconds on a CPU without requiring a dataset - just a vocabulary - Numpy-only inference: The packaged can be install the package with minimal…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15IM

    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 →

  16. 16PF

    Introducing embeds.ai: an embedding playground to compare how embedding models work on a real world use case (retrieval augmented generation for Wikipedia articles + Elad Gil's High growth handbook) A few weeks ago, Shreyan and I were looking for an embedding model to use for RAG. We eventually came across the MTEB leaderboard, but we struggled to understand the benchmark scores. We wanted a tool to test various embedding models with example queries on real-world datasets. After unsuccessfully looking for such a “playground”, we decided to just build one ourselves! We embedded HuggingFace’s…

    2023 · embeds.ai · its alternatives →

  17. 17MO

    A small demo for a Metarank open-source project I'm maintaining.

    2023 · demo.metarank.ai · its alternatives →

  18. 18AO

    Hi, I'm Ben, the co-creator of Embedbase. Embedbase lets you use OpenAI Embeddings and Pinecone seamlessly. For example, you can add Embedbase to your app and pair it with GPT3 to allow people to search using natural language (e.g. How many workouts did I complete last week?), or simply expanding your current search experience beyond full-text search (e.g. looking for "similar" documents in Notion to find other related information) Managing embeddings is uncharted territory, we needed to discover the best practices ourselves. Now we're happy to share our learnings with Embedbase. Shoot if…

    2023 · embedbase.xyz · its alternatives →

  19. 19BC

    We are a small group of undergrads interested in building human in the loop coding agents. We dream of a world where building complex agent workflows feels as simple and creative as playing with legos. When we were building stuff we needed a tool that made it easy to try out different code embedding models so that we could see which ones worked best in different scenarios and understand their strengths and weaknesses. So to speed that process up we made PurpleSearch an 'instant' search engine for your local codebases. This tool lets you quickly deploy any open source embedding model on…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  20. 20IB

    Hey all! I wanted to share this project I've been working on that can maybe help you or your developer friends out. I built a RAG system for our product a while back and didn't realize how easy they were to get started. So I put together my learnings into this online course. It's not quite ready but if you sign up and mention HackerNews, I can get you early access. I'm looking to get feedback on the following: (1) materials — is it engaging & did you learn something? (2) UI/UX of the platform — did you have any issues that prevented you from starting or finishing the tutorial? (3)…

    2024 · takehomes.com · its alternatives →

  21. 214E
  22. 22UE

    User Embeddings lets you build user-intent AI agents, hyper-personalized semantic search, and bring up-to-date information to GenAI applications in a personalized way. Docs: https://firstbatch.gitbook.io/firstbatch-sdk/ If you are a YC company , you can get User Embeddings free for a year by signing up here: https://www.firstbatch.xyz/subscribe

    2023 · userembeddings.firstbatch.xyz · its alternatives →

  23. 23AB

    Hey HN Community! We built this simple community search tool that basically allows people to search through thousands of past Reddit threads and tens of thousands of recommendations using tags. It mostly covers a few bigger subreddits like r/BIFL, r/MFA, r/AskMen, r/SkincareAddiction but along the way, I expanded it to include other smaller subreddits too. In addition to filtering by category, power users can also search by -Body Fit (big thigh, long torso) -Occupation (work in retail, teacher, doctor) -Age (18-24, 25-35), Size (height, weight) -Brand comparison (similar…

    2022 · reddrecs.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24IB

    Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…

    May 2026 · wannalaunch.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →