Alternatives
Products that do what I built a search engine for independent websites does
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…
- 1IM
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
- 2IB
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
- 3RA
In the sprit of releasing to the public early, I would like to share a search engine/portal I have been building in my spare time: https://www.runnaroo.com Why: I started to not be able to easily tell the different between ads and organic search results in other search engines (even on DuckDuckGo), and I have been disappointed with recent UI changes in a lot of the major search engines. My main guiding rule when adding features has been to ask, "is it better for the user?" Important to know: I still believe Google currently returns the most relevant web results, so like…
2020
- 4MW
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
- 5AS
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
- 6AS
Hi guys, Lately, I’ve noticed myself searching for things in Google and then typing Reddit (e.g. “opinion on Liz Truss reddit.”) I tried to work out why I was doing this, initially thinking that I just wanted to enjoy the social aspect of the internet, but now I think I do it because, sometimes, I want to see results which have been filtered down by people, not by the Google search algorithm. One of the many examples of where I think this can be useful is when searching for products or services. I know that if I Google “best laptop for gaming,” the results will be the products of large…
2022 · crowdsearch.xyz
- 7IB
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
- 8FF
A little while ago I built an automated website that finds free stuff while filtering out scams. It works in an interesting way. Most freebie sites on the web contain a mix of real, useful free stuff and scammy affiliate and pyramid schemes. I realized that affiliate links are always unique (because they need to contain an affiliate code) while real freebies have URLs that co-occur across multiple sites at roughly the same time. I wrote a crawler in Perl and MySQL that looks for repeating, off-domain URLs that temporally cluster on multiple free stuff sites. I was surprised and pleased to…
2011
- 9MS
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
- 10HB
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
- 11IM
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
- 12MI
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
- 13IB
I've been frustrated by so many blogging platforms. Last I used Ghost. I thought it was expensive and I hated that www I had to prefix on custom domain. So, I built https://lykhari.com just for myself and then opened for public. If you want something simple do try. It became profitable and hence self sustaining!
2025 · lykhari.com
- 14RT
Hey HN! Why I built this: Over the last 10 years I relied heavily on Twitter as my primary source of information. I could get a wide range of information in one place, and each information nugget came in a small format of about 280 characters which was good for summarizing. But recently due to algorithmic changes and the AI frenzy, Twitter has become very noisy and hard to keep up with. So I built GoldenScoop. It takes personalized information requests and runs a swarm of agents in the background. Our swarm reads multiple news sources every day and provides customized information based on…
2025 · goldenscoop.live
- 15PS
Hi HN, This one's a twofer. First, I'm showing off my personal site and blog, garrettgoss.com [1]. I'm looking to make a career change — from biomedical engineering/biomedical research, to research and development engineering in the consumer product development/additive manufacturing space — and felt that my prior work experience inadequately reflected my true interests and skills, which are better exemplified by my side projects. I put this together for myself, to better document my own work, for the broader internet, to share some of the projects I've developed to those who might…
2019
- 16IM
I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with…
2020
- 171R
I wanted to find a product idea to build. "Build things people want," right? So I thought, why not literally find people saying what they want? I wrote a script to collect thousands of Reddit posts where people are looking for a solution or complaining about a problem. Then I used GPT to filter out the noise and score each one based on how viable the idea seemed. Threw together a simple search interface so anyone can explore them. I was planning to build a more advanced paid version of this, but figured I'd share the raw version first to see if it's actually useful to anyone.
Nov 2025 · search.reddit-business-ideas.workers.dev
- 18IB
bluhe is a social-first search engine, know what people are saying on X, Reddit, Tiktok, YT, Instagram & Facebook.
Jun 2026 · bluhe.ai
- 19IB
This site was born out necessity. I needed a break from the internet we know today: clickbait, politics, low quality content, breaking news, AI summaries Such a breadth of information but so little depth Now I spend (too much of) my time here, going deep. Just when I need to scratch that itch. But I keep coming back because it actually makes me a better engineer. Oh, and I made the site. Right. Anyways, I hope you enjoy crawling the blogs as much as I have. Enjoy! And PLZ reply with any feedback. I am here to make this site better. It will always be free.
2025 · codecrawl.co
- 20IB
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
- 21IM
Hi there! I've been working with data in one form or another, professionally, for about 5 years. I've been thinking about my own personal data and how it's used for at least twice that long. I've been sort of building something in my head for a while that solves my own problem and, in the beginning of this year, I found the opportunity to spend some time building it out. I'll leave the detailed explanation to the blog post but, in short, I built what amounts to an API crawler combined with a data processor to help you download your personal data from 3rd party services and work with it using…
2024 · joshcanhelp.com
- 22TB
Hello everyone, I have always loved coding and in the couple I was thinking of making an open source project and it turned out to be awesome I hope you guys like it. I present Explore Singapore which I created as an open-source intelligence engine to execute retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on Singapore's public policy documents and legal statutes and historical archives. The objective required building a domain-specific search engine which enables LLM systems to decrease errors by using government documents as their exclusive information source. What my Project does :- basically it…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 23IB
Hello all, I built about 2 years ago a coding website for kids, teens and adults: https://codeguppy.com Despite my efforts to promote the website it is still not well know. I post almost daily about it on Twitter at https://twitter.com/codeguppy ... but even there I don't have views. The website is fun... although I still have a ton of things to add. I appreciate if you take a look and suggest improvements and most importantly help me with spreading the news about this website. I really need a boost! Thanks all!
2021
- 24IM
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
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