Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Minimalist, text only search engine with prefixes to play with
I made this classic looking text only search engine(sorry if that's overexaggerating) where you can get concise and straightforward results with sources. There are 5 prefixes right now. It is a prototype kinda thing right now. I am busy for my upcoming exams. So, I would appreciate if anyone is interested to contribute. I am currently using Gemini for this project. If anyone can implement better api's and improve code and the features it would be great help. It's generating fake source links right now, the search is slow, prefixes like weather and time needs to be fixed using api's related…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Minimalist, text only search engine with prefixes to play with launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1DR
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 →
- 2FS
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 →
- 3
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 →
- 4
Full Text Search Engine - built for Hackers not Hyperscalers - 0xnyn/blaze
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Tantivy▲68A full-text, horse-speed search engine library in Rust
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
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 →
- 8FS
Hi! According to my benchmark tests I've just built the fastest free-text search engine in the world [0]. However, providing proof of that as well as making people care has proven to be a near impossible task. I could use some help from fellow programmers to both work on the formal proof but also to test this code against the Big5's offerings of full-text search. Would you care to go fetch an amount of common crawl data to test the abilities of ResinDB? If not, then do you perhaps have another strategy to convince people when you have invented something big? Is writing papers and formally…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 9
I kept running into this annoying problem: I’d remember a really useful answer, but not where it was. ChatGPT? Claude? Gemini? No idea. So I’d end up digging through all of them or just rewriting the prompt. Built this to fix that. It’s a Chrome extension that indexes chats locally and lets you search across them all in one place. Once it’s indexed, search is basically instant. Still early. UIs change and break things sometimes, so it’s a bit fragile in places. Curious if other people have the same issue or if it’s just me jumping between tools too much.
Apr 2026 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
- 10
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 →
- 11FC
i saw last week that if you include a curse word in your Google search query it won't serve an AI overview, serves less ads, and less "zero click" Google properties. so I made a little tool to help facilitate this search, saving you literally hundreds of microseconds!
2025 · fuckingsearch.com · its alternatives →
- 12IB
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 →
- 13UI
Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com · its alternatives →
- 14IM
Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!
2024 · saas-quick.com · its alternatives →
- 15MP
My first "real" web app! I appreciate any comments/suggestions.<p>Also I am available for hire. Contact me at www.sambolgert.com
2012 · se.cret.ly · its alternatives →
- 16
MiniSearch is celebrating its 1st birthday! Exactly one year ago, I shared the initial version of this side-project here. Since then, there have been numerous changes under the hood. I use it daily as my default search engine and have done my best to make it useful. I hope it's interesting for you too!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Creator here, I made this out of mild frustration with the current state of search engine results. Let me know what you think.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18GV
Hey HN, I just updated my project that compares some LLMs. It uses your prompt for all the models and runs at the same time. You can see the results being generated in real-time and decide what's the best for your use case. I'm open to any suggestions and feedback. Thanks!
2024 · geminivsgpt.com · its alternatives →
- 19II
I can't say "I created a tool" because obviously I only had an idea, then asked Cursor to implement it and 15 minutes later it was ready ;) Often I found I was manually replacing em dashes with hyphens in AI-generated text before I use them in copy, PR descriptions etc. It still feels like a shame to flare the text "you wrote" was not really human made. To automate these removals, here it is: super tiny online page. I made it for myself, but whoever wants, you can use it as well. I am not going to monetize it or promote more than this post.
May 2026 · undsh.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Hi folks! I created a frontend-only live semantic search engine based on transformers.js and sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2. Simply pour in your text and a query term. Hit enter and watch the search engine in action! It's highly customizable and stores the embeddings in a variable so that consecutive runs are very fast. You can tweak the segment length to reduce computation time or get get more precise results. I would be very happy to discuss some more usage ideas or receive PRs for improvements. Introduction blog post:…
2023 · geo.rocks · its alternatives →
- 21IM
AI search results are quickly becoming more important than SEO, but as businesses, we have no visibility over it! That's why I'm building "Ahrefs for AI search results". Track keyword performance on AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity & more
2025 · linrush.com · its alternatives →
- 22ST
I got tired of the cognitive dissonance involved in reading twitter -- topics kept jumping around. So, i wrote a thingy. Features: - filter by user, list, or regex - each group you filter to has its own "mark as complete" button (so you don't have to read everything in one sitting, but can still be a completionist eventually). - tries to do inline images with a lightbox - tries to be compact - first time users, can have it auto-gen a config fore you - config is a multi-line text block so super-powerful but not UX friendly Drawbacks: - does save your configuration in a db in the cloud so not…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 23FF
This was my last weekend project, but due to school, wasn't able to finish it till today. Disregard the design and tell me as much of the following as possible: Would you ever use this to search for more current app reviews, or is completely unnecessary? If you like the idea, how would you suggest I improve it? Any and all feedback is welcome. http://www.labs.alexgreene.me/
2012 · labs.alexgreene.me · its alternatives →
- 24WA
http://wolfrasms.com It's like Siri for the 99%. Or a TI-89 via SMS. Or something. If you want to skip the website, just text your query to +1 206 462 5742 (that's +1 206 46-ALPHA). Feel free to test it out and give me feedback. While it will stay a tiny project, I'm interested in any way to make it better. Built with the Twilio & Wolfram|Alpha APIs, and Heroku of course.
2012 · wolfrasms.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 →