Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Marginalia – Exploration Mode
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…
Marginalia – Exploration Mode is a web browser for discovering interesting websites through undirected browsing. It presents random selections from a pool of approximately 10,000 domains that users can refresh to find… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Marginalia – Exploration Mode launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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 →
- 2
Browsing Mode▲141Online space for exceptional website designs
2024 · browsingmode.com · its alternatives →
- 3MS
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 · its alternatives →
- 4
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 →
- 5
- 6AS
Hey all, Last time when we were on HackerNews [1], we received a lot of feedback, and we incorporated most of it. - We have changed our name from grep.help to usegrasp.com - A privacy policy page - Bulk import - Pricing page We are happy to introduce a new feature: a personalized answer search engine that provides direct citations to the content on the page. Demo: https://usegrasp.com/search?q=is+starship+fully+reusable%3F 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35510949
2023 · usegrasp.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Browser Buddy▲156Hey HN, thank you for being a part of the internet we love. We’re Arnav, Mo, Jeremy and we’re building an “Internet for-you page” that recommends blogs and essays based on your interests. Try it here (https://www.browserbuddy.com/)! We love to discover and learn from personal blogs, essays, and articles on the internet. But despite exciting advancements in language modeling, it’s felt harder to discover interesting links from real people. We believe there is untapped potential to use these language models as “curators” rather than “creators”. To explore this, we’re building a…
Dec 2025 · browserbuddy.com · its alternatives →
- 8MN
2013 · shortdomainsearch.net · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 10ER
2019 · randomsite.lhackworth.com · its alternatives →
- 11
- 12
2021 · stumbled.cc · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
Hello HN, I’m Kamil. The past months have been filled with news about ChatGPT, Bard, etc. Thankfully, there are some heroic attempts to bring that power to the users. I wanted to contribute to that effort with my side project, an extension for Chrome: it makes searching the history by meaning – instead of the exact words – possible. This is only a proof of concept, building on the excellent transformers.js[0], and running entirely in the browser. My goal here is to explore the possibilities unlocked by a client-side AI. I would love to have your feedback, to know which direction that project…
2023 · getpinbot.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Locus▲96AI-powered CTRL + F for quick document search on Chrome
2023 · locusextension.com · its alternatives →
- 16TI
2020 · theinternetportal.net · its alternatives →
- 17
Your bored button for discovering random websites
Nov 2025 · therandomweb.com · its alternatives →
- 18MS
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 · underthesite.com · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20RHRabbit Holes▲43
Built a way to spatially explore wikipedia topics! Enter a topic of your choice and dig into the rabbit hole. All content is from Wikipedia—related topics are generated with GPT based on the summary. Spacebar to expand a topic inline, arrow keys to move around, and "J" to open journey view!
2024 · rabbitholes.wiki · its alternatives →
- 21
Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce the release of my last project, MiniSearch. I admire Perplexity.ai, Phind.com, You.com, Bing, Bard and all these search engines integrated with AI chatbots. And as a curious developer, I took the chance and created my own version. Using Web-LLM and Transformers.js to provide browser-based text-generation models on desktop and mobile, I built a minimalist self-hosted search app on which an AI analyses the results, comments on them and responds to your query summarising the info. In the backend, it still queries a real search engine, but besides that,…
2023 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 22IB
Hey all! I wanted to share this project I've been working on that can maybe help you or your developer friends out. I built a RAG system for our product a while back and didn't realize how easy they were to get started. So I put together my learnings into this online course. It's not quite ready but if you sign up and mention HackerNews, I can get you early access. I'm looking to get feedback on the following: (1) materials — is it engaging & did you learn something? (2) UI/UX of the platform — did you have any issues that prevented you from starting or finishing the tutorial? (3)…
2024 · takehomes.com · its alternatives →
- 23FF
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 · absurdlycool.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I didn't realize Universe Sandbox ran on MacOS, and I was in the mood to play around a bit. Some functions it's got: - Random system generation - Sonification is super fun too - Habitability Simulation (Just for fun, don't cite this please) - Replacing, spawning, deleting objects I've had tons of fun building this, so I hope someone else can share the joy. It's free and runs in the browser. I'd love to hear any feedback. I think this is at a state where I might leave it as it is, but if people are interested in other features, maybe I'll keep working on it. I've kept saying I'll stop working…
Dec 2025 · luna.watermelonson.com · 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 →