nowfound

Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I'm building a non-profit search engine

An open source, non-profit web search engine. Contribute to mwmbl/mwmbl development by creating an account on GitHub.

This is a non-profit search engine project launched in late 2021 and hosted on GitHub. It appears to be built by developers interested in creating a search alternative outside the commercial space. The project is… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I'm building a non-profit search engine launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1AN
  2. 2

    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 →

  3. 3

    A browser extension that can be installed by volunteers to participate in mwmbl distributed crawling. - mwmbl/crawler-extension

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4DR

    I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  5. 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. 6

    The all in one search engine for PH, DN, HN and GitHub ✊

    2015 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    The ultimate search engine for GitHub repositories

    2024 · codefinder.dev · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Cloud-native OSS search engine for observability. Contribute to quickwit-oss/quickwit development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hi HN, We’re Brendan and Michael, the creators of Sourcebot (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot). Sourcebot is an open-source code search tool that allows you to quickly search across many large codebases. Check out our demo video here: https://youtu.be/mrIFYSB_1F4, or try it for yourself on our demo site here: https://demo.sourcebot.dev While at prior roles, we’ve both felt the pain of searching across hundreds of multi-million line codebases. Using local tools like grep were ill-suited since you often only had a handful of codebases…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    The best RSS Search experience you can find. Contribute to davidesantangelo/dato.rss development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11FS

    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 →

  12. 12

    Open a web search in your terminal. Contribute to zquestz/s development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13AE
  14. 14

    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 →

  15. 15RS

    Explore any niche. Discover pain points, content opportunities, and what solutions people are eager to pay for.

    2022 · gummysearch.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    A decentralized search engine for IPFS and Filecoin

    2021 · dweb-search.on.fleek.co · its alternatives →

  17. 17
  18. 18SN

    Based on http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html I asked myself what would it take to build a Google-like search engine? What would change people's minds about using different search engine than Google and then it hit me out of the blue. I would love to use nonprofit open-source search engine. That's why I built Sleio (http://www.sleio.com/) - a search engine that donates 100% of its profits to causes you love. It's powered by Google at the moment, but I believe it's a good start. I am eager to hear ideas how to make this happen. Your feedback is very appreciated.

    2014 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Project Management Inside GitHub – Free for open-source + …

    2015 · its alternatives →

  20. 20AS

    Watup Hackernews, We have created a new type of search engine that searches on the full source code of webpages, not just the on-page text. It's called NerdyData (nerdydata.com) and we're launching today! Our search engine is different from search engines you've used before. Traditional search engines are geared towards providing answers, whereas our goal is to give you the best list of results for a query. Our crawler has visited over 140 million homepages and collected terabytes of HTML, Javascript, and CSS code. We've also designed several search interfaces that allow anybody to query…

    2013 · its alternatives →

  21. 21TM

    Free Recruitment Meta Search Engine for Sourcing Software Developers

    2023 · talentsignals.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine - benbusby/whoogle-search

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23GN
  24. 24

    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 →

Also compare

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 →