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Growth · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News

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…

Hacker Search is a semantic search engine for Hacker News that allows users to find relevant articles by typing keywords or descriptions rather than exact search terms. It uses OpenAI's embedding models combined with… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1AD

    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 →

  2. 2

    Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

    2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    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 →

  4. 4

    Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.

    2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    A new experimental UI for Hacker News Search

    2015 · its alternatives →

  6. 6SH

    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 →

  7. 7
  8. 8DF
  9. 9HN

    2018 · jsomers.net · its alternatives →

  10. 10
  11. 11WH
  12. 12HC

    There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result: http://www.hackernewsers.com/ It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.

    2010 · hackernewsers.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13HT
  14. 14

    A database of top ranking Hacker News front page posts

    2020 · harishgarg.gumroad.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15IB
  16. 16

    Alerts, AI summaries, and easy search for Hacker News

    2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17HN

    Based on your feedback (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8874801) we've released a new version of the Hacker News Search. It's accessible through the search box in the footer of Hacker News. We hope you'll enjoy the new minimal design and the additional features. Feel free to give us your dream list of improvements :) ChangeLog: 2015-01-19 - Custom date range picker - Responsive design - New "comments[<>=]X" syntax to filter by number of comments - If the story doesn't have any URL, the link goes to the HN discussion - Here and there cosmetics improvements (less padding,…

    2015 · hn.algolia.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18FH

    Hey HN. I created this website. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pj4533.com&#x2F;hn-overlooked&#x2F; It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…

    2025 · pj4533.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.

    25d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →

  20. 20FT

    2016 · hackernewsfilter.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21AT

    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 →

  22. 22

    Get only the stories and comments you want. Follow users, keywords, jobs, mentions of your product, etc.

    2014 · hnapp.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23HN

    2012 · hncomments.nathancahill.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Web Extension: Easily find Hacker News discussions about the page you're currently browsing. - pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext

    2020 · 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 →