Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built a 2B-page search engine, independent of Google/Bing
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
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 →
- 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 →
- 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 →
- 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've been working on a little open source [1] search engine, nilch. I noticed that nearly all well known search engines, including the alternative ones, tend to be run by companies of various sizes with the goal to make money, so they either fill your results with ads or charge you money, and I dislike this because search is the backbone of the internet and should not be commercial, so it runs in a not-for-profit style and aims to survive on donations. Additionally I'm personally really sick of AI in my search results so I got rid of that, and I wanted DuckDuckGo bangs so it supports all of…
Dec 2025 · nilch.org · 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
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 →
- 8
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 →
- 9
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 →
- 10
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 →
- 11
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 →
- 12IM
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 →
- 13IM
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 →
- 14
So I've been obsessed with a weird question for the past 6 months, what happens to SEO when everyone starts asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling? The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity? I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly. It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it…
Dec 2025 · firstclick.so · its alternatives →
- 15
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
2022 · highbrow.se · its alternatives →
- 16WS
Hi HN, We are building a search engine to help founders, investors, and early adopters to easily discover startups from all over the world. Discovering startups - whether it is a potential competitor, to validate an idea or as part of a DD process - is a difficult and time-consuming process. We believe that many existing platforms require expensive subscriptions and general-purpose search engines often do not give a complete enough picture. To solve this problem, we are releasing a free-to-use search engine (with a relatively generous daily limit on search volume). No sign-up is required. We…
2023 · symonda.com · its alternatives →
- 17
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 →
- 18
Hey everyone, I wanted to see if I could build something like DataFa.st myself, so I made MochiAnalytics. I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. It’s got all the bells and whistles a small team or solo founder would need to track campaigns and to see which channel is driving revenue. It’s a cheaper analytics tool for side projects, indie hackers, and small apps. I honestly wish I could make it free, but it still needs servers, a database, and a backend to keep event ingestion running 24/7, so there are real costs behind it. I’m still working on it and will keep adding more features…
Jul 2026 · mochianalytics.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Excited to share something I've been building recently called CandySearch. I made it to solve a personal pain with a SaaS product I built, which was that we were always monitoring Reddit and Twitter to see if anyone had mentioned keywords indicating they were looking for us. Before, we had to go manually respond to posts, often missing good mention opportunities. Would love for HN folks to try it and let me know what you think!
2025 · candysearch.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 20KY
Hey HN I built a free AI SEO app called seoby.ai. I'm launching it on ProductHunt, Reddit and a few other places on Monday (19th February). It's 100% free, and has some pretty neat tools: 1. AI Content Detector: Find out if your content was written by a human or generated by AI. 2. AI Outline Generator: Remove writer's block and generate SEO-friendly outlines for your articles, blog posts, and landing pages. 3. AI SEO Topic Cluster Generator: Generate SEO-optimized topic clusters for your website and get better search engine visibility. I would love feedback/ideas/suggestions of…
2024 · seoby.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
MiniSearch is celebrating its 1st birthday! Exactly one year ago, I shared the initial version of this side-project here. Since then, there have been numerous changes under the hood. I use it daily as my default search engine and have done my best to make it useful. I hope it's interesting for you too!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22BA
2013 · facebookpagesearch.apoorv.pro · its alternatives →
- 23
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 →
- 24
seofor.dev▲11Hi everyone! This is just me scratching my own itch, but since every time I build an app or a website I spend hours wondering how to make it not invisible to the world, I thought I'd build an SEO app that perfectly fits my needs. Most SEO tools are designed for agencies and copywriters, the usual pricing is simply too high for me, and there are just too many features that I don't need. I haven't found one that can crawl my local web server and that synergizes with my AI tools, so I made it myself. What I need is an app that tells me how to make my pages fully optimized, on what keywords to…
2025 · seofor.dev · 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 →