Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Feep! search, an independent search engine for programmers
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.
Feep! is an independent search engine designed for programmers, built using ElasticSearch and developed since September 2021. The tool indexes programming-related content and runs on a single home computer. While still… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Feep! search, an independent search engine for programmers launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1DR
I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 2AS
Hey all, Last time when we were on HackerNews [1], we received a lot of feedback, and we incorporated most of it. - We have changed our name from grep.help to usegrasp.com - A privacy policy page - Bulk import - Pricing page We are happy to introduce a new feature: a personalized answer search engine that provides direct citations to the content on the page. Demo: https://usegrasp.com/search?q=is+starship+fully+reusable%3F 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35510949
2023 · usegrasp.com · its alternatives →
- 3SE
Hey HN, Blog discovery is a problem [0] due to the decentralized nature of online writing. Everyone writes on their own site or platform, and there’s no central place that brings everything together. Google results prioritize large media publications over blogs, so we need something else. Blog Surf is an attempt to organize all of the great online writing done by individuals. I launched this project last year as a directory of personal blogs [1], but have now rebuilt it from scratch into a full-text search engine for blog posts. You can search for blog posts, and filter by publish date and…
2022 · blogsurf.io · its alternatives →
- 4AD
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 →
- 5
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 →
- 6
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 →
- 7
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 →
- 8
Library.one▲111Link sharing platform for experts, contextual search engine
2022 · library.one · its alternatives →
- 9
I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com · its alternatives →
- 10
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/
2024 · singulatron.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Allsearch is a tool I made after getting fed up with Google's search results and reading up on conversations on HN about the state of search on the internet. This is a tool I made as a spiritual successor to GnodSearch (https://www.gnod.com/search/), which I've seen in a couple conversations about search on HN. GnodSearch is great, but a bit barebones in terms of looks and functionality; Allsearch is my attempt to build off of it. Similar to Gnod, Allsearch allows you to apply any given search query to a search engine of your choice (either through only keystrokes, or via…
2022 · allsear.ch · its alternatives →
- 12
Instantly jump to your ag or ripgrep matches. Contribute to aykamko/tag development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13TM
Free Recruitment Meta Search Engine for Sourcing Software Developers
2023 · talentsignals.com · its alternatives →
- 14WD
2023 · svmetasearch.eu.org · its alternatives →
- 15
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 →
- 16SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news · its alternatives →
- 17IB
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 →
- 18
Dear HN Community, I am a long time fan and first-time contributor. I just launched a developer focused semantic search platform and wanted to share it with the community. The idea is simple: upload structured or unstructured documents, select the fields you want to index and tag as metadata, and instantly get a clean search API you can use in your own app. Here is what it currently supports: - Manage your own tenants and projects - Upload .json and .txt files (support for .pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .yml, etc. coming soon) - Expose 3 APIs: search, upload document (embeddings), and delete document -…
2025 · aisearch.vpuna.com · its alternatives →
- 19SE
Hey HN! I've been hacking on a project and figured I'd share it with the community. CrowdView is a search engine for niche forums and message boards (MetaFilter, HN, Reddit, and 3000+ forums). Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and have resorted to adding "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to all my queries (since 2015!). Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out "what does a genuine, real life human think about this thing?". But limiting my results to just Reddit isn't ideal because so much great content exists elsewhere. Lots of great information…
2023 · crowdview.ai · its alternatives →
- 20
I made this site for myself, SimpleSearch.info, as new default browser page. I’m not sure if it actually _saves_ time or clicks (though, for me, it saves at least one click per search), but I find the search experience more pleasant. On desktop, it’s nice to just have these search bars as the first thing that pops up in a new window or tab vs clicking bookmarks in the toolbar or elsewhere then searching. Similarly, on mobile, I like just clicking on one icon for all my searches. The vast majority of my web browsing begins with a search or LLM query. I’m curious if this is helpful to anyone…
2025 · simplesearch.info · its alternatives →
- 21
Jello SEO▲11I 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 →
- 22
Like many solo devs and indie hackers, I was paying $100+/mo for enterprise SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush) but only using about 5% of their features. I really just needed basic keyword research, SERP difficulty analysis, and simple rank tracking. I wanted to see what the actual floor was for raw SEO data if you stripped away the fluff and enterprise bloat. I spent the last few months wiring together different data sources to find out. I got my costs down to a few cents per report and because the data is so cheap to fetch on-demand, I packaged it into a minimalist tool which strictly…
May 2026 · idiotproofseo.com · its alternatives →
- 23CA
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 →
- 24
There's a lot of paid search engine indexation tools out there and I wanted to create my own. Been working as an engineer for over a decade now and my open-source contribution has always been something I wanted to do. Thus I decided to create FastIndex, an open-source search engine indexation alternative to paid solutions such as TagParrot, URLMonitor, Omega Indexer and many more. Source: https://github.com/maurocasas/fastindex Wiki: https://github.com/maurocasas/fastindex/wiki
2024 · github.com · 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 →