Alternatives
Products that do what My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no AI, & all DDG bangs does
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…
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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
- 3MI
I've always been frustrated with search engines. Google used to be the one I always used, but it's now completely overrun with ads and AI Overview. Alternatives like Mojeek, Marginalia, DuckDuckGo, or Startpage don't seem to give me the results I'm looking for. What's even worse is that search engines like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Ecosia are using AI Overviews too. These features ARE optional, but I still felt annoyed that I had to opt out of everything. This is why I created my search engine Slick. Slick is an independent search engine with its own index. It aims to be everything users…
May 2026 · slicksearchhq.com
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- 6WS
Hi HN, We are building a search engine to help founders, investors, and early adopters to easily discover startups from all over the world. Discovering startups - whether it is a potential competitor, to validate an idea or as part of a DD process - is a difficult and time-consuming process. We believe that many existing platforms require expensive subscriptions and general-purpose search engines often do not give a complete enough picture. To solve this problem, we are releasing a free-to-use search engine (with a relatively generous daily limit on search volume). No sign-up is required. We…
2023 · symonda.com
- 7CD
I love DDG !bangs so much, that I kept finding myself in need of custom search !bangs... So I built them! I absolutely love DDG's search !bangs! ... even more than their stance on privacy. If you've ever found yourself wishing for a custom search !bang you're in the same boat as me :) Sure, sometimes submitting a public !bang is the way to go... But not always. Maybe you want to override the default !weather or you want a custom !bang for an internal tool used by your employer. You can create your custom search !bangs at https://interrobang.online
2019
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- 9IB
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
- 10UD
2012 · duckduckgoog.com
- 11IM
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
- 12AS
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
- 13IB
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
- 14BA
Hello HN! I made this Firefox extension to extend upon DuckDuckGo's idea of bangs (check https://duckduckgo.com/bangs if you aren't familiar with them) and also allow the use of any search engine with them. I found DuckDuckGo's bangs fascinating, but was disappointed by how little search engines inherit that feature. And on top of it, DuckDuckGo has the "!" bang that jumps to the first search result but other search engines offering bangs like Brave Search, searx, You.com don't seem to have that. I also thought that the "!" bang could be extended with the ability to jump to…
2023 · github.com
- 15HB
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
- 16IB
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
- 17SN
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
- 18FD
I like to use DuckDuckGo-style bangs and snaps, they are fast and efficient shortcuts. However, neither Kagi nor DuckDuckGo resolves them as quickly as I would like and subjectively Google has better search results than DuckDuckGo. After trying a few local alternatives eg. unduck, unduckified, I wasn't satisfied, the ones I tried briefly loaded a page before redirecting causing visible page flickering, still took time to resolve the actual redirect and lacked advanced features (address-bar autocomplete). Flashbang avoids that by handling the redirect in a Service Worker, before the browser…
Jul 2026 · flashbang-dyr.pages.dev
- 19IB
I built Meepo – a smarter search engine for a local (South African) fashion and homeware store. I have no affiliation with said store. I built this for myself, because I was frustrated at how difficult it was to find what I wanted with the existing search engine + I was curious how well CLIP (a relatively new AI technique with open source code and models) would work here. I think it works quite well! It's much more forgiving than the original search engine. I don't have to guess what exactly they decided to label a particular item. But what I like even more is that it works quite well for…
2022 · meepo.shop
- 20PO
Back in 2021 I wanted to switch away from Google and try alternatives. To my disappointment they were... not great. I took a way of comparing qualities and disadvantages of each web search engine back then. What I discovered I cared about the most was privacy (like DuckDuckGo), ecology (Ecosia) and Google index (likely to signal quality of results, Startpage). To my disappointment there wasn't a single one that I could find that offered all 3 of these qualities. After a long time of deciding if and how I could build my own web search engine I decided to do it. At first, for 4 years, it was…
Jul 2026 · prieco.net
- 21RM
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
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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
- 24IM
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…
2025 · indieseas.net
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