Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Search Engine for Forums
Hey HN! I've been hacking on a project and figured I'd share it with the community. CrowdView is a search engine for niche forums and message boards (MetaFilter, HN, Reddit, and 3000+ forums). Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and have resorted to adding "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to all my queries (since 2015!). Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out "what does a genuine, real life human think about this thing?". But limiting my results to just Reddit isn't ideal because so much great content exists elsewhere. Lots of great information…
CrowdView is a search engine that indexes over 3,000 niche forums and message boards including Hacker News, Reddit, and MetaFilter. It helps users find genuine discussions and opinions from real people by searching… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Search Engine for Forums launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1CD
Hey HN! I've been hacking on a project and figured I'd share it with the community. CrowdView is a search engine for discussion sites (forums, message boards, Discord, and Twitter for now). Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and have resorted to adding "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to all my queries (since 2015!). Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out "what does a genuine, real life human think about this thing?". But limiting my results to just Reddit isn't ideal because so much great content exists elsewhere. Lots of great information and…
2022 · crew-rho.vercel.app · its alternatives →
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- 3
Reddit Answers▲377Real answers from real people, powered by Reddit communities
2024 · reddit.com · its alternatives →
- 4SE
Hey HN, Blog discovery is a problem [0] due to the decentralized nature of online writing. Everyone writes on their own site or platform, and there’s no central place that brings everything together. Google results prioritize large media publications over blogs, so we need something else. Blog Surf is an attempt to organize all of the great online writing done by individuals. I launched this project last year as a directory of personal blogs [1], but have now rebuilt it from scratch into a full-text search engine for blog posts. You can search for blog posts, and filter by publish date and…
2022 · blogsurf.io · its alternatives →
- 5
We built Valohai LLM for tracking and comparing LLM evaluation results. Whether your evals live in notebooks and spreadsheets, or you're using an observability tool that wasn't built for comparison, this gives you a purpose-built eval comparison dashboard. Run evals with a Python library (pip install valohai-llm), results stream in, and you can compare up to 6 configurations side by side. Group by any dimension (model, category, difficulty) to see where each model excels. It doesn't do tracing or production observability, for now just eval tracking and comparison. What's cool is that you can…
2020 · valohai.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Linkeddit▲618The tool actually hit Product Hunt #1 back in February. Since then I’ve added a bunch more on top of the original version. Now you just describe the intent or goal for the leads you want, and it searches based on keywords and a bunch of other signals to surface the best ones for you. I also added a Reddit-powered content writer. Basically, you pick a topic or category, and it pulls the top posts from Reddit, analyzes what made them go viral, and helps you write content using the same patterns. Reddit is super underrated for content. If something blows up there, it almost always spreads to…
2025 · linkeddit.com · its alternatives →
- 7
With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
Apr 2026 · text.blogosphere.app · its alternatives →
- 8
Hi HN, I am Jiayuan, and I'm here to introduce a tool we've been building over the past few months: Devv (https://devv.ai). In simple terms, it is an AI-powered search engine specifically designed for developers. Now, you might ask, with so many AI search engines already available—Perplexity, You.com, Phind, and several open-source projects—why do we need another one? We all know that Generative Search Engines are built on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)[1] combined with Large Language Models (LLMs). Most of the products mentioned above use indexes from general search engines…
2024 · devv.ai · its alternatives →
- 9AS
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 →
- 10FS
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 →
- 11DR
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 →
- 12AD
We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
2024 · hn.trieve.ai · its alternatives →
- 13
Inspired by the "Ask HN: Share your personal site" last week, I finally came around and built a thing I wanted for a long time: a simple website to randomly explore all the awesome personal blogs without having to subscribe to them all. So this is what I built over the weekend. You click a button and indieblog.page will redirect you to a random page from a personal page... I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
2022 · indieblog.page · its alternatives →
- 14
VoteVid▲106Hey, I am Victor, a french student. I was tired of getting really bad recommandations from the algorithm, always the same videos, same topics. So I created a community-driven recommandation tool, with upvotes like Product Hunt or Hacker News. Looking for something to watch or want to share something you liked? Feel free to check the site, it's free, no account needed (unless you want to share or upvote a video).
Nov 2025 · votevid.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 16
I saw a comment here about how there are so many indexes of indie sites, blogs, etc but there wasn't an index of all the indexes. So I built it. It doesn't require a log in, just go browse! I've curated about 30 or so, but there is a submission form if there are ones I am missing. Also happy to take UI improvements because I am not great in that area!
May 2026 · theindex.fyi · its alternatives →
- 17
I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Scriptmine▲86I built this for myself. I make videos, and my biggest bottleneck is figuring out what to say to my audience without staring at a blank page. So I built Scriptmine: a tool that listens to Reddit conversations in my niche, finds high-signal topics, and turns them into scripts. How it works: - Track subreddits and discussions relevant to a niche - Rank topics by engagement/momentum - Generate a hook/body/CTA draft in a chosen voice/format
Feb 2026 · scriptmine.ai · its alternatives →
- 19IB
I’ve been messing around with Bluesky for a while, and one thing I really missed was a proper way to browse discussions in a structured, Reddit-like way specially myself being daily reddit user. So, I ended up building a Reddit-like client for Bluesky that scratches that itch: Threadsky.app It pulls in trending topics, lets you explore conversations with a threaded view (so no more getting lost in replies), and even allows users to create channels with customizations, basically, like subreddits but on Bluesky. That said, this is still pretty barebones, and there’s a lot to improve. I really…
2025 · threadsky.app · its alternatives →
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- 21IndexFlow▲114
IndexFlow makes Discord threads searchable on the web.
2025 · indexflow.site · its alternatives →
- 22SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news · its alternatives →
- 23
CrowdReply▲140Reddit marketing without managing accounts or proxies
2025 · crowdreply.io · 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 →