Alternatives
Products that do what High Browse independent “surf engine” does
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
- 1
- 2GS
Yesterday the top upvoted comment for "Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057772 was adding personal domain blacklists. I offered to build this if there was enough interest so here's a minimum viable product for Chrome (Firefox soon to follow): https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbckmoknagndlhjbeohb. Your feedback is welcome!
2011
- 3SO
SURF (Search Utility & Reading Framework) is an open-source API that bridges LLMs with the web. It provides a standardized interface for web search and content processing that preserves formatting of tables, code, and complex layouts. Key features: - Multiple search providers (SearXNG, DuckDuckGo, Brave) - HTML cleaning and smart content extraction - Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for Claude and other AI assistants - Self-deployable with minimal setup (Docker, bare metal, cloud) - API key authentication I built this to make it easier to add web capabilities to LLM applications…
2025 · github.com
- 4MS
Hello HN! I've been working on http://underthesite.com for the last month and now think it is ready for some full strength HN feedback. What do you guys think? It crawls up to 10 pages of a given site while you wait, looking for community-provided CSS / XPath selectors and regular expressions. Additionally, I'd like to appeal to you to submit matchers for technologies that you care about. Technologies are easy to add, so add your favorite jQuery plugins, analytics tools, client-side node.js wrappers, what have you. I'm going to be running a large crawl in the next few days and want to make…
2011
- 5IB
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
- 6SH
Hi HN, We participated at the Mozilla WSOH (http://wsoh.eventbrite.com/) over the summer. It was a hackathon organized by Mozilla for interns all over Silicon Valley with an attendance of over 300+ interns from Facebook, Google, etc. A friend and I made SurfControl and were the winners of the hackathon. We just pushed our product live and would love to get feedback! ------------- About SurfControl: "SurfControl is an add-on that shows you how you waste time online, and gives you tools to block or limit your time spent on different websites." It is a Firefox add-on and can be downloaded at…
2011
- 7MW
This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required.
2011 · burntbrunch.github.com
- 8MI
I've always been frustrated with search engines. Google used to be the one I always used, but it's now completely overrun with ads and AI Overview. Alternatives like Mojeek, Marginalia, DuckDuckGo, or Startpage don't seem to give me the results I'm looking for. What's even worse is that search engines like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Ecosia are using AI Overviews too. These features ARE optional, but I still felt annoyed that I had to opt out of everything. This is why I created my search engine Slick. Slick is an independent search engine with its own index. It aims to be everything users…
May 2026 · slicksearchhq.com
- 9IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
- 10IM
Hi there! I made a project for pure joy called Indieseas.net. I made it because I disliked how search engines completely ignore smaller websites, prioritizing ads and businesses. That said, I decided to make my very own search engine! But, how could I keep business websites outside the system? The solution were 88x31 buttons. These are images or gifs that were used back in the days to connect websites between eachother. This was useful because search engines weren't very bad in the times. Thankfully, people still use them a lot nowadays! So, I whipped up a program in Typescript using Bun…
2025 · indieseas.net
- 11RM
Hello HN! Being a software engineer and an SEO guy I wrote a heap of tools and scripts to make my life easier. Now I've decided to share some of them with the community, and made a small site where I will be publishing them. They are all completely free (yes, free forever) and you don't even need to sign up for the site. Just use the thing as you like, no limits. Currently you can access 4 instruments: - Backlink retriever - Thin/weak content analyzer - Traffic trend analysis - Visitor list retriever I am planning on releasing more free tools with time, and trying to stay original by…
2018
- 12SA
I love to use Flipboard on my iPad, but I was bummed that the experience couldn't follow me to the phone or desktop, so I decided to do something about it... I built http://ridesurfboard.com over the winter holiday and just finished it up last night, so I wanted to share it with the HN community first. The app turns any website with an RSS feed into a more human, flippable format. It's all HTML5/CSS3/JS and works best in either desktop Safari or on an iOS device, although you can use Chrome if you enable the experimental GPU Accelerated Compositing flag (a how-to is on the Surfboard blog).…
2011
- 13IB
Hi HN! My name is Yossi, and I'm a solo indie maker. SEO tools are super pricey and free tools often fall short, leaving most users to costly subscription-based tools. So, I built SEO Stuff, a keyword tool that uses a credit-based system for builders like me who use SEO more sporadically. Have a great day!
2024 · seo-stuff.com
- 14YS
Every now and then I see these posts where people post the domains they purchased for XYZ side project that is clearly not happening. But considering how difficult it can be to find a good name, its always nice to see what people are willing to part with. Post your domains!
2013
- 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
- 16UA
I use several browsers between college, work and home and I like to have them synced so I can find websites I've searched for in a browser when I don't have access to it or access my bookmarks. I don't like the idea of using any of the sync services offered by the major browsers because of how they might use my data, because they lack some features I'd like to have, and because they all try to lock you into their ecosystem. So I'm building an open source cross-browser manager for browsing activity. I would love to hear your thoughts on this concept, and if you have any questions or…
2024 · github.com
- 17WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 18IB
I built Meepo – a smarter search engine for a local (South African) fashion and homeware store. I have no affiliation with said store. I built this for myself, because I was frustrated at how difficult it was to find what I wanted with the existing search engine + I was curious how well CLIP (a relatively new AI technique with open source code and models) would work here. I think it works quite well! It's much more forgiving than the original search engine. I don't have to guess what exactly they decided to label a particular item. But what I like even more is that it works quite well for…
2022 · meepo.shop
- 19SS
2013 · surfly.com
- 20MT
I made this classic looking text only search engine(sorry if that's overexaggerating) where you can get concise and straightforward results with sources. There are 5 prefixes right now. It is a prototype kinda thing right now. I am busy for my upcoming exams. So, I would appreciate if anyone is interested to contribute. I am currently using Gemini for this project. If anyone can implement better api's and improve code and the features it would be great help. It's generating fake source links right now, the search is slow, prefixes like weather and time needs to be fixed using api's related…
2024 · github.com
- 21IB
Hi, folks. How would you define the "Golden Age" of the internet? In my opinion, it’s when people ran personal websites, blogs, or portfolios to share thoughts and stories. These websites could be unstable, slow, or "ugly", but they were the true digital gardens of individuals, making the internet colorful. It's such a pity that most of the content from independent websites is hidden in the corner. Therefore, I built RawWeb (https://rawweb.org) to index all these hidden gems. It collects content through feeds (RSS, Atom) and sorts the results by relevance. It also features an OPML…
2024 · rawweb.org
- 22IM
Hi hn! It has always annoyed me that recipe websites are so cluttered and have so much (in my opinion) useless fluff, so I made a little website to solve that problem! One good thing about SEO for once is that Google has pretty much forced the internet to adopt JSON-LD for recipes so many recipes are directly extractable and for others I have several fall back parsers including an indieweb parser :) If you do find a website that is broken feel free to click the flag button or share it as I would love to fix any edge cases
Apr 2026 · tangled.org
- 23MS
Some of this has previously been available in a somewhat inaccessible format. I've recently been working on a redesign of the marginalia search website.
2024 · test.marginalia.nu
- 24AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
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