Alternatives
Products that do what Runnaroo – A new web search engine does
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…
- 1
- 2IB
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
- 3IM
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
- 4FS
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
- 5GS
Yesterday the top upvoted comment for "Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057772 was adding personal domain blacklists. I offered to build this if there was enough interest so here's a minimum viable product for Chrome (Firefox soon to follow): https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbckmoknagndlhjbeohb. Your feedback is welcome!
2011
- 6
- 7SL
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
- 8MI
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
- 9IB
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
- 10AS
Hi guys, Lately, I’ve noticed myself searching for things in Google and then typing Reddit (e.g. “opinion on Liz Truss reddit.”) I tried to work out why I was doing this, initially thinking that I just wanted to enjoy the social aspect of the internet, but now I think I do it because, sometimes, I want to see results which have been filtered down by people, not by the Google search algorithm. One of the many examples of where I think this can be useful is when searching for products or services. I know that if I Google “best laptop for gaming,” the results will be the products of large…
2022 · crowdsearch.xyz
- 11GA
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
- 12WS
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
- 13TR
I decided to cut all the other features and just release the startup I have been working on for the last few months. http://seekier.com I hate to put it like this, but look at it as a twitter for sharing what you search. Seekier lets you see what others are searching, allows you to share your own searches, and discover more through discussion. Please let me know what you think of the idea and concept. There may be bugs because I decided to just release it. Thanks! If you decide to register, be great if you posted your profile.
2010
- 14CD
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
- 15MS
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
- 16IM
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
- 17BA
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
- 18RM
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
- 19HB
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
- 20IB
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
- 21FA
I built this simple Netflix Search Engine for myself but I think this could be useful to anyone who uses Netflix. http://www.flicksery.com Blog post : http://tmblr.co/ZemAIvYPpv2C Please let me know your feedback. Thanks
2012
- 22MI
Hi! Recently I've launched - mybfio.io - platform for software reviews with social network aspect. Prehistory Many great system are already in place that allow people to search and rate software products, including the site I am publishing this post on. However I have always felt that those systems are not specifically centered around product/software development lifecycle (releases, real users feedback over a product entire lifetime, so on) and often too broad or not designed specifically for that type of work, which is ok. Why? As an opensource author I would like to have constant…
2021
- 23S
We’re about to start promoting our coming soon landing pages and wanted to get some feedback from the HN community first. http://soupnextdoor.com - Marketplace for dinner parties We’re running a competition about where our launch will be. This will give us something to promote other than the fact that we’re coming soon and hopefully get some conversation started. We’re looking for feedback across the board. UI, color scheme, browser compatibility issues, problems with our idea, marketing ideas, issues with how we’ve worded things, etc We’ve left Django in debug mode for the time being so if…
2011
- 24UA
I use several browsers between college, work and home and I like to have them synced so I can find websites I've searched for in a browser when I don't have access to it or access my bookmarks. I don't like the idea of using any of the sync services offered by the major browsers because of how they might use my data, because they lack some features I'd like to have, and because they all try to lock you into their ecosystem. So I'm building an open source cross-browser manager for browsing activity. I would love to hear your thoughts on this concept, and if you have any questions or…
2024 · github.com
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