Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built a search engine for independent websites
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I built a search engine for independent websites launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
I created this chrome extension for myself where I track my own behavior locally and recommend myself content from platforms I want content from (youtube/twitter/quora/etc) in a feed. I made it public just in case anyone else was interested. I would rather have control over my own algorithm and own the data. Also, it gives me flexibility. Turns out I do like these feeds just not when I don't own it haha. Let me know what you think of my implementation?
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2SE
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 →
- 3
I saw a comment here about how there are so many indexes of indie sites, blogs, etc but there wasn't an index of all the indexes. So I built it. It doesn't require a log in, just go browse! I've curated about 30 or so, but there is a submission form if there are ones I am missing. Also happy to take UI improvements because I am not great in that area!
May 2026 · theindex.fyi · its alternatives →
- 4
Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 5IM
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 →
- 6IB
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 →
- 7IB
Hi there! When Supabase announced their recent hackathon, I thought it was a good time to build something to learn more about so many of the new AI models and tech out there. From the different techniques of embedding documents to the future RAG. With the rise of short form content with TikTok and Youtube. A lot more knowledge is in videos than ever before. Finding specific answers within millions of videos can be difficult for any one person to go through. So the question is if there is Google that indexes text on website making it easier to find based on the context of on your question,…
2023 · avse.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 8
Dweb Search▲79A decentralized search engine for IPFS and Filecoin
2021 · dweb-search.on.fleek.co · its alternatives →
- 9IC
Hey all! Super excited to share this! If you're familiar with the r/InternetIsBeautiful sub-reddit, then you'll enjoy this. I built the website as a fun side project project over the weekend, and it re-imagines what r/internetisbeautiful would be if it was a newsletter. It's meant to be a completely free and community generated resource of the most interesting, useful and awesome websites from the depths of the internet. The list is tiny right now and I would love to hear your recommendations of websites that you think we should include. Hope you enjoy it, and would love to hear…
2023 · internetisbeautiful.co · its alternatives →
- 10
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 · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12AS
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 · its alternatives →
- 13SE
Hey HN! I've been hacking on a project and figured I'd share it with the community. CrowdView is a search engine for niche forums and message boards (MetaFilter, HN, Reddit, and 3000+ forums). Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and have resorted to adding "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to all my queries (since 2015!). Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out "what does a genuine, real life human think about this thing?". But limiting my results to just Reddit isn't ideal because so much great content exists elsewhere. Lots of great information…
2023 · crowdview.ai · its alternatives →
- 14
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 →
- 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 →
- 16
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 →
- 17
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 →
- 18
Discover interesting blogs from around the Internet
2022 · blogdb.org · its alternatives →
- 19RT
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 · its alternatives →
- 20IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 21AS
A series of experiments in applying the Lindy Effect to the internet — lessons from over 5 years of product building.
2021 · lindylearn.io · its alternatives →
- 221R
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 · its alternatives →
- 23
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 →
- 24
bluhe is a social-first search engine, know what people are saying on X, Reddit, Tiktok, YT, Instagram & Facebook.
Jun 2026 · bluhe.ai · 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 →