Alternatives
Products that do what Search engine for your personalized network of high-quality websites does
Hello Hackers! I am Vignesh. As you all know, the current search engines are inundated with low-quality, SEO-spammed results (which will soon be AI-generated). At Grep, I have developed a new kind of search engine where you can choose to follow a minimum of 7 websites that you like. Grep will build a network of 4-degree connections by considering the websites you follow and the websites that those websites link to, and so on. If the minimum requirement of 70,000 websites in your personalized network is not met, Grep will expand the network up to 7 degrees of connection. Of course, Grep is…
- 1OS
2016 · deusu.org
- 2
- 3LS
Kicked my course off today - grep101.com - with lessons starting Monday. I think I've got the pricing right to attract a good class of keen learners for this first run through...
2012
- 4FL
2014 · kwfinder.com
- 5LP
2014 · linkwok.com
- 6IB
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
- 7AS
We built a search engine that shows you the most engaging stories/topics being shared across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+. We crawled over 15 million articles the past 3 months, retrieved the total number of Facebook likes, tweets, Google+’s etc and built a search index around it. Here's what our infrastructure looks like: Rails/Redis: We use the Sidekiq gem as a message queue. We have hundreds of workers that do the crawling, data mining, and number crunching. ElasticSearch: We built the search index using ElasticSearch, with the data imported from our Postgres…
2013 · buzzsumo.com
- 8IW
2020 · searchcommons.org
- 9MS
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
- 10IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com
- 11WS
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
- 12OS
There is already a lot for Google, but let's not forget that there are more search engines out there.
2024 · github.com
- 13SF
2020 · getsupersimplesearch.com
- 14ND
2014 · newdomain.ninja
- 15IM
2022 · github.com
- 16CS
Thesis: Sites that do well on hacker news will tend to be sites with high quality content. Tools: Hacker News Big Query, python, Google CSE Steps: 1. Using HN Big Query, get all unique domains with more than 3 stories with more than 50 points (query link [1]). Sort by percentage of such stories to total number of stories. By doing that, at the top you will get sites like blog.geoffralston.com that have 3 out of 3 submitted stories get more than 50 points (100% !). Or lucumr.pocoo.org had 46 out of 124 total stories reach 50+ points! Talking about good writing. We cut the list at 2,500 sites…
2019
- 17IM
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
- 18FF
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
- 19GG
As part of my bigger goal to make the web more agent-friendly, this weekend i decided to tackle google. The "AI-native" search APIs like Tavily and Exa exist, but they require setup and don't actually use Google's results. So I built something simple - a proxy that takes Google search URLs and returns the results as clean markdown instead of HTML. You literally just change "google.com" to "googllm.com" in any search URL. ```bash # Returns 500KB of HTML: curl "https://google.com/search?q=AI+news" # Returns clean markdown: curl…
2025 · googllm.com
- 20GA
Hi HN, I’ve been working on Spiderseek, a platform to help track and grow website visibility in AI-powered search engines (e.g. Perplexity, ChatGPT, and other agents). Traditional SEO tools are expensive and focused on Google-style search. I wanted something lightweight and AI-first, so I built Spiderseek: AI Research – Explore domains and keywords to uncover new opportunities. AI Analytics – See traffic, crawl activity, and page metrics, plus insights from AI agents. Content Submission – Get content indexed instantly in major AI agents. Rankings – Browse the top 1000 domains sorted by…
Sep 2025 · spiderseek.com
- 21HB
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
- 22AS
2021 · datorss.com
- 23IB
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
- 24RW
Been messing with cosine similarity and decided to try calculating nearest neighbors over the entire link graph for the marginalia search engine. Turns out that you can just bruteforce that in a day or two. And the results are pretty good. One drawback is that depending on if you're looking at an older website, a lot of the links are dead. The deduplication isn't great either.
2022 · explore2.marginalia.nu
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