Alternatives
Products that do what Marginalia – Exploration Mode does
I've been a bit obsessed with the idea of flipping through the internet a bit like you would a magazine, of undirected browsing as a discovery mechanism, and I think I'm approaching something that's beginning to feel pretty fun. The link at the top will return results out of a pool of approximately 10,000 domains, you can refresh to get new ones. You can also explore in a directed fashion by using the 'Similar Domains'-buttons. These are not random. A sampler, beyond the random sites offered with the head link https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/www.amiga-news.de…
- 1HB
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
- 2MS
Some of this has previously been available in a somewhat inaccessible format. I've recently been working on a redesign of the marginalia search website.
2024 · test.marginalia.nu
- 3
- 4MN
2013 · shortdomainsearch.net
- 5SR
2020 · stumblingon.com
- 6
- 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
- 8MW
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
- 9RW
Been messing with cosine similarity and decided to try calculating nearest neighbors over the entire link graph for the marginalia search engine. Turns out that you can just bruteforce that in a day or two. And the results are pretty good. One drawback is that depending on if you're looking at an older website, a lot of the links are dead. The deduplication isn't great either.
2022 · explore2.marginalia.nu
- 10AB
Recently i stumbled on too many clickgates on the Medium blog Towards Data science. Considering that most people publish to share knowledge on Medium and are driven into putting their content behind a paywall, without actually getting paid for it, including myself. I felt like Medium is running the academic publishing scheme. Get free content and get paid for it. So I decided to create a small script to bypass the paywall on Medium, it turns out it also works on other newssites. Heres the website: https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium/ For the curious I will explain the…
2019
- 11FF
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
- 12YS
Every now and then I see these posts where people post the domains they purchased for XYZ side project that is clearly not happening. But considering how difficult it can be to find a good name, its always nice to see what people are willing to part with. Post your domains!
2013
- 13SI
Hey all, remember back when the internet was fun? Before the days of information overload and AI slop. Back when sites were recommended by close friends instead of an algorithm. I miss that. And I’m trying to bring some of that magic back. So I've built Stumble Again. It's inspired by the OG StumbleUpon, and it’s a place where you can rediscover the internet with a curated selection of hand-picked websites, apps, and hidden gems from the depths of the internet. Check it out and let me know what you think? P.s. Would love to hear your recs for sites to be added. Drop a comment with your top…
Jun 2026 · stumbleagain.com
- 14TT
I built a simple tool that suggests good domain names based on your idea, something I usually spend way too long on myself. It's free, no sign-up needed, 5 searches / day (a bit wonky, working on that part). Mainly built it for myself but would love some feedback and tips for improvement! :) Thanks!
2025 · helpmefindagooddomainnameformyidea.com
- 15TY
Hey there, HN people! I would like to share with you a little tool I've been working on this year. It's called Newsy https://www.newsy.co Problem I have more than 30 domains that I've bought over the years. I plan to (eventually) do something with them, but meanwhile, they are un-used and just sitting there. I want to use them somehow. I know there are a few impulsive domain buyers out there! :) My Solution I wanted to turn my un-used domains into something useful without me having to do too much work. So I created Newsy https://www.newsy.co It turns your un-used domains…
2020
- 16SA
2021 · stumbled.to
- 17SA
I love to use Flipboard on my iPad, but I was bummed that the experience couldn't follow me to the phone or desktop, so I decided to do something about it... I built http://ridesurfboard.com over the winter holiday and just finished it up last night, so I wanted to share it with the HN community first. The app turns any website with an RSS feed into a more human, flippable format. It's all HTML5/CSS3/JS and works best in either desktop Safari or on an iOS device, although you can use Chrome if you enable the experimental GPU Accelerated Compositing flag (a how-to is on the Surfboard blog).…
2011
- 18IB
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
- 19ND
2014 · newdomain.ninja
- 20BR
2018 · batname.com
- 21DG
I tend to use AI to brainstorm domain names, but I kept wasting time pasting each idea into Namecheap to see if they were available. So I built DotComBuddy - it generates ideas (using DeepSeek V3 - switched from GPT-4o after realizing quality was just as good) and checks availability in real time via Name.com’s API. Built with Next.js and Vercel’s AI SDK, the app gives you a table of available domains with their price. 10 free searches to try it out, then $9/year (what I’d pay to never do this manually again). Sharing this for anyone else tired of switching tabs to check domains. Happy…
2025 · dotcombuddy.com
- 22IB
I had an idea for this concept for a while and decided to build a little website around it. It's kind of a silly idea but I'm really curious to see how it plays out. If you're a particularly curious person, be warned. By submitting a payment to the game, you get to see how many other people were curious enough to play. You will be ranked based on your payment amount, and get to discover some interesting insights about the game's dynamics. Hope you like it
2024 · thecuriositygame.com
- 23IB
I built a website for games that catch my eye or have something interesting going on. I made it for fun but then updating became a habit. Maybe you'll find your next "must-play" game here? GitHub repo: https://github.com/RaycatWhoDat/games-list
Nov 2025 · alistof.games
- 24AC
Hello, This is something I've wanted to build for awhile (first bought the domain in 2020 (then lost it for a year+)). It's a tactics solver on each new tab page. There are 5 modes of play: Easy (<1200 elo) Medium (1200-1800) Hard (1800-2400) Expert (2400+) Speedrun (solve as many puzzles as possible in 60 seconds). I'm having a ton of fun with it, and definitely noticing improvements with actual games (definitely solved the most puzzles in my life while developing this extension). If you check it out, please let me know what you think. Any feedback is good!
Apr 2026 · leetchess.com
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