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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Exa Websets

Hey HN! I'm Will, founder of Exa (YC21 - https://exa.ai). Today we're opening up Websets, a search engine that finds massive lists of correct results given complex queries. For example, you can search for: - “software engineers in the Bay Area, with experience in startups and big tech, who know Rust and have published technical content”: https://websets.exa.ai/cm7ax5bl8003276q689v0dde5 - “US based healthcare companies, with over 100 employees and a technical founder": https://websets.exa.ai/cm6lc0dlk004ilecmzej76qx2 - "research paper about ways to…

Exa's Websets is a search engine that retrieves large, accurate result sets in response to complex queries with multiple criteria. Users can search for specific combinations of attributes—such as software engineers… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Hi HN! We’re Abhilash Chowdhary, Chris Pisarski and Manmohit Grewal. We built Crustdata (YC F24). Today we’re launching our web search API for AI agents, which not only returns the most relevant documents from the web but also maps them to the correct entity (person, company or event). Demo video here https://youtu.be/IouWW97hBN8 If you run agents at scale, tokens become a line item. The web data is the worst input: long pages, repeated content, mixed entities, stale claims. The usual web search -> scrape -> summarize + structure forces the agent to spend tokens doing…

    2025 · crustdata.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    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 →

  3. 3

    I built a search engine for engineering blogs because I was tired of manually checking individual company blogs to find real-world production examples. The problem: When learning a new technology, the best insights often come from how companies like Google, Meta, or Stripe actually implement it in production. But these gems are scattered across dozens of separate engineering blogs with no way to search across them. What I built: Engineering.fyi indexes engineering blogs from ~15 companies (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Uber, etc.) and makes them searchable in one place. You can…

    2025 · engineering.fyi · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…

    2024 · hackersearch.net · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    The all in one search engine for PH, DN, HN and GitHub ✊

    2015 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Making it easier to discover datasets. Made by Google.

    2018 · datasetsearch.research.google.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Find startups hiring nearby you on a beautiful map. 500+ startups. 1200+ live job openings (updated twice weekly). Work mode filters (Remote, Hybrid, On-site). Funding, valuation, and revenue details. Key investors & founder profiles. All cross-checked & verified social links.

    Aug 2026 · nextdoor.company · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Boost relevance and UX with fast hybrid and semantic search

    2025 · meilisearch.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9IM

    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 →

  10. 10

    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 →

  11. 11AD

    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 →

  12. 12WS

    We’ve trained a generative AI model to browse the web and answer questions/retrieve code snippets directly. Unlike ChatGPT, it has access to primary sources and is able to cite them when you hover over an answer (click on the text to go to the source being cited). We also show regular Bing results side-by-side with our AI answer. The model is an 11-billion parameter T5-derivative that has been fine-tuned on feedback given on hundreds of thousands of searches done (anonymously) on our platform. Giving the model web access lessens its burden to need to store a snapshot of human knowledge…

    2022 · beta.sayhello.so · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    DoMore.ai▲143

    Your personalized AI tools catalog with semantic search

    2023 · domore.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    A search engine for breakout startups 🔍🔥

    2018 · startupsift.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15OA

    Hi HN, I built an open-source AI agent that has already indexed and can search the entire Epstein files, roughly 100M words of publicly released documents. The goal was simple: make a large, messy corpus of PDFs and text files immediately searchable in a precise way, without relying on keyword search or bloated prompts. What it does: - The full dataset is already indexed - You can ask natural language questions - Answers are grounded and include direct references to source documents - Supports both exact text lookup and semantic search Discussion around these files is often fragmented. This…

    Jan 2026 · epstein.trynia.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16AS

    Watup Hackernews, We have created a new type of search engine that searches on the full source code of webpages, not just the on-page text. It's called NerdyData (nerdydata.com) and we're launching today! Our search engine is different from search engines you've used before. Traditional search engines are geared towards providing answers, whereas our goal is to give you the best list of results for a query. Our crawler has visited over 140 million homepages and collected terabytes of HTML, Javascript, and CSS code. We've also designed several search interfaces that allow anybody to query…

    2013 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    An experimental AI-organized search results page

    2025 · blog.google · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    We built a search engine that shows you the most engaging stories/topics being shared across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+. We crawled over 15 million articles the past 3 months, retrieved the total number of Facebook likes, tweets, Google+’s etc and built a search index around it. Here's what our infrastructure looks like: Rails/Redis: We use the Sidekiq gem as a message queue. We have hundreds of workers that do the crawling, data mining, and number crunching. ElasticSearch: We built the search index using ElasticSearch, with the data imported from our Postgres…

    2013 · buzzsumo.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19AE
  20. 20TM

    Free Recruitment Meta Search Engine for Sourcing Software Developers

    2023 · talentsignals.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Quickly search through web development things

    2016 · its alternatives →

  22. 22FA

    As a founder, finding early customers is always a challenge. I'd come up with specific guesses for people to talk to - such "VCs that used to be startup founders" or "Former lawyers who are now CTOs." Running those types of searches typically involves opening dozens of LinkedIn profiles in tabs, and looking at them one-by-one. And, it turns out that going through LinkedIn profiles one-by-one is a daily job for many people. I started building Find AI to make it easier to search for people. I initially started just having GPT review people's LinkedIn profiles and websites, but it cost…

    2024 · usefind.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    A source code search engine

    2014 · searchcode.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Discover the best engineering content from top tech companies, conferences, and indie blogs.

    Oct 2025 · devblogs.sh · its alternatives →

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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 →