Alternatives
Products that do what Search Engine for Forums does
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…
- 1IB
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
- 2RH
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Old Reddit Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Hi HN, Inspired by this post earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237559, I thought we could make blog discovery easier by having a place to find interesting, unusual, niche, or really any kind of non-marketing blogs that are posted by the people that write them. There are a ton of interesting blogs on the web, probably more than there were when the web was new, but even though there's more they're a smaller…
2020
- 3AI
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
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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
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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
- 14RA
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
- 15TR
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
- 16IM
2010 · ftfysearch.com
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I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021
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Find Reddit threads that rank on Google and get cited by LLM
Mar 2026
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2020 · forumsearch.io
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I've gotten more and more of these and A. I'm often not interested and B. they upset me more often than not. Since Reddit randomizes class-names and runs recommendations under different names this was more tricky than expected but it works reliably now.
2023 · github.com
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I wanted to find a product idea to build. "Build things people want," right? So I thought, why not literally find people saying what they want? I wrote a script to collect thousands of Reddit posts where people are looking for a solution or complaining about a problem. Then I used GPT to filter out the noise and score each one based on how viable the idea seemed. Threw together a simple search interface so anyone can explore them. I was planning to build a more advanced paid version of this, but figured I'd share the raw version first to see if it's actually useful to anyone.
Nov 2025 · search.reddit-business-ideas.workers.dev
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I was already doing this semi-manually for a handful a websites of my own and then I thought "Hey, other people might want to do this too". Tracking the Google homepage and BBC News can be pretty fun too. Got my first paid customer on the weekend, which felt good. :) Anyway, here's the site: http://dailyscreenshot.com/ Thoughts, comments, feedback?
2011
- 23WS
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
- 24IM
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
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