Alternatives
Products that do what I made a search engine for the indieweb does
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…
- 1IM
2021 · github.com
- 2MA
hi all, I've always wanted to make my own game, but couldn't afford a thousand-dollar adobe (flash+photoshop) license. I'm not a talented programmer, have no degree in CS. But I understand some elements of design. So I got me a copy of ImpactJS, and after about 5 months of steep learning curve (at least for me), I managed to come up with a game. I also integrated it with a highscore and badge system, similar to what you get at Kongregate. You need to login with Google/OpenID to earn badges/scores. link is: http://www.hotbazooka.com/privatejoe hope to hear some feedback/questions from you guys!
2011 · hotbazooka.com
- 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
- 4IB
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
- 5IB
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
- 6SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 7MS
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
- 8IB
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
- 9AN
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
- 10RM
Hello HN! Being a software engineer and an SEO guy I wrote a heap of tools and scripts to make my life easier. Now I've decided to share some of them with the community, and made a small site where I will be publishing them. They are all completely free (yes, free forever) and you don't even need to sign up for the site. Just use the thing as you like, no limits. Currently you can access 4 instruments: - Backlink retriever - Thin/weak content analyzer - Traffic trend analysis - Visitor list retriever I am planning on releasing more free tools with time, and trying to stay original by…
2018
- 11IT
I created http://devtest.net as a weekend project, and I'm pretty proud of it from a technical and UI standpoint. The problem is, I've built this by myself in a bit of a vacuum, to "scratch my own itch", and I don't know if this is useful to anyone other than me. I'm also not so hot on the business side and don't really know what I'm doing. Basically, I'm looking for some advice, now that I've actually launched, what now? One thing that this has shown me is that I'm capable of putting together a pretty decent web application on my own in my spare time. Should I stick with this idea, or…
2012
- 12HB
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
- 13IR
I built Morph, an experimental fullstack HTML-first library for Deno, Node, and Bun. Everything returns HTML, not JSON. No React, no Vite — just plain HTML with server-side rendering. No build steps, no preprocessors, no complex configs — everything runs from a single file. Perfect for Telegram Web Apps, internal tools, simple admin panels, dashboards, or anywhere a full-blown SPA feels like overkill. Important: I built this entirely for myself — to solve my own problems. I hate complex frontend. I hate writing it. And I don’t want to waste time on it. But maybe it’ll help you too.
2025 · github.com
- 14IH
Hello HN, I had some christmas free time over the last two weeks (Merry Christmas btw ;-)) and used that time to completely recreate the website of my app[1]. I used all the fancy new tools. I didn't know some of them when I started. What was my goal? * Pretty website * Blazing fast * Mobile first * SSR * Webp support * Generally all the best website practices (high lighthouse score) What did I use? * Tailwindcss (https://tailwindcss.com/) * Tailwind Components (https://tailwindui.com/) * React (https://reactjs.org/) * ViteJs…
2021
- 15IF
So, after many years of kicking about little apps and not putting the full effort in, I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it. Very much inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I present Griddol (http://www.griddol.com) a tool to create and play word searches. Intended mainly for teachers, but encouraging those who like a word search too. This been churning around in my head for over a year in various forms, and I used the concept to help learn CoffeeScript, CouchDB and node.js, so even if the product itself is a failure, the learning process has been valuable. I'll be the first…
2011
- 16IB
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
- 17PS
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
- 18GA
Hey HN! Just want to share a project of mine called Giggle. It uses Google's Programmable Search Engine service to apply allow- and block-lists to your searches in an easy way. I've shared it before[0] but just went through and refreshed/refactored a ton of things. Two things to note from the changes are it no longer uses Puppeteer for Google login and the license is now MIT. Happy to answer any questions! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067354
2023 · github.com
- 19IM
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
- 20MF
Progressive Web App, "Finding Nora": https://nora.now.sh/ It was also my first attempt at TypeScript + React. Preliminary conclusion: Getting started is a bit slower and the code more verbose, but refactoring become sooo much easier. And: Almost no need to reload and debug anymore. Once TypeScript is satisfied with my code it generally just works. Source code and more information can be found here: https://github.com/vnglst/finding-nora
2018
- 21HF
I've been having a blast making multiple mini apps that run in the browser. I've been trying to see how far I can go without having a backend and relying on other services. I wrote these for fun and wanted to know what folks think.
Jun 2026 · joeheyming.github.io
- 22MF
Here is the link: http://www.wikihowtodo.com I know a lot of geeks share the same dream -- build the next kick-ass todo-list/project management system. So do I. However, as I was quite positive that my web development skill is worse than 99% of developers' in this community, I decided to build something simple, useless but unique. So I built this. Basically it's a Wikihow scraper, nothing more. It gives you a place to store interesting Wikihow articles and yes, they are converted into todo lists. I know this site is not that good, but I still need your guys' feedback. For example, as I am a…
2010
- 23IM
I build a lot of small products myself and I realized how many indie founders want an exit that doesn’t involve platforms charging large commissions or requiring big revenue numbers. Sometimes a project makes $50/month, sometimes $500, sometimes $0 but has a great codebase, and that’s enough value for someone else. So I built buy-startups.com, a very simple, privacy-friendly marketplace for buying and selling small online startups. It’s not fancy. There’s no commission, no listing fee, no hidden funnel. Just a straightforward way for indie devs and bootstrappers to list a project and…
Dec 2025 · buy-startups.com
- 24ID
Hey HN! I develop browser extensions, I suck at web design, and I've been exploring AI/LLMs. With my new found free-time since dropping work hours, I've developed a Design Copilot browser extension [0]. It does what it says on the tin - you choose a part of your website and the tool gives you instant expert design feedback - "change this font to that, add this much whitespace, use brighter colours .... etc" The tool is completely 100% free to use, its powered by bringing your own AI API Key, and the current LLM it uses is Google Gemini 1.5 Pro. I've yet to hit the free rate-limit and I…
2024 · old.reddit.com
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