Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to High Browse independent “surf engine”
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
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. High Browse independent “surf engine” launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
I've been a bit obsessed with the idea of flipping through the internet a bit like you would a magazine, of undirected browsing as a discovery mechanism, and I think I'm approaching something that's beginning to feel pretty fun. The link at the top will return results out of a pool of approximately 10,000 domains, you can refresh to get new ones. You can also explore in a directed fashion by using the 'Similar Domains'-buttons. These are not random. A sampler, beyond the random sites offered with the head link https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/www.amiga-news.de…
2022 · search.marginalia.nu · its alternatives →
- 2FS
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.
2022 · search.feep.dev · 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 →
- 4
- 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
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 →
- 7
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 · its alternatives →
- 8IB
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 →
- 9
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 · its alternatives →
- 10
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 · its alternatives →
- 11IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 12
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 · wsoh.eventbrite.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14
wsgrok▲7I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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 →
- 16
Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce the release of my last project, MiniSearch. I admire Perplexity.ai, Phind.com, You.com, Bing, Bard and all these search engines integrated with AI chatbots. And as a curious developer, I took the chance and created my own version. Using Web-LLM and Transformers.js to provide browser-based text-generation models on desktop and mobile, I built a minimalist self-hosted search app on which an AI analyses the results, comments on them and responds to your query summarising the info. In the backend, it still queries a real search engine, but besides that,…
2023 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 17IM
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 →
- 18
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 · its alternatives →
- 19WW
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 · its alternatives →
- 20IB
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 · its alternatives →
- 21IB
Hey HN, I built a website where you can train Llama 3.1 8b & 70b (4bit) on your data. I use unsloth in the backend and the training is done on H100s which I rent programmatically from Runpod. I'd love some feedback. If you would be interested in using it feel free to book a chat with me: cal.com/hamada/tunellama-intro Happy to give you free credits :) P.S. I'm also looking for a co-founder as I have big plans for this.
2024 · tunellama.com · its alternatives →
- 22MT
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 · its alternatives →
- 23
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 · its alternatives →
- 24MS
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 · its alternatives →
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