Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Solve for All – customizable, private, hackable search engine launched in 2016; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   searx▲82

   A privacy-respecting, hackable metasearch engine

   2016 · its alternatives →

2. 2
   Tesse▲99

   A new interactive search engine with people as results

   2017 · tesse.io · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Exa 3.0free tier, from $4/mo▲187

   Smarter search that gives AI agent richer data at lower cost

   2d ago · exa.ai · its alternatives →

4. 4NF
   New, Fast, Anonymous, Tor-First Search Engine▲9

   2019 · search4tor7txuze.onion · its alternatives →

5. 5EO
   Enhanced, Open-Source Google Search for Hackers▲5

   2016 · search.spince.com · its alternatives →

6. 6BA
   Built Anonymous Search Engine for Facebook Pages▲5

   2013 · facebookpagesearch.apoorv.pro · its alternatives →

7. 7
   Re/code Decode - Y Combinator's Sam Altman▲92

   and the internet of things and Google

   2015 · serve.castfire.com · its alternatives →

8. 8
   Tantivy▲68

   A full-text, horse-speed search engine library in Rust

   2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

9. 9PS
   Private Search – Decoupled identity and search, no Google/Bing▲5

   2020 · private.sh · its alternatives →

10. 10PC
    Privacy conscious, discovery focused search engine – Whize (Alpha)▲6

    2020 · alpha.whize.co · its alternatives →

11. 11HI
    HackerSearch.io – GitHub search that supports RegExp▲9

    2015 · hackersearch.io · its alternatives →

12. 12BA
    Built a small search engine without the fluff▲6

    2024 · kgrep.com · its alternatives →

13. 13
    MiniSearch, a minimalist search engine with integrated browser-based AI▲17

    Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce the release of my last project, MiniSearch. I admire Perplexity.ai, Phind.com, You.com, Bing, Bard and all these search engines integrated with AI chatbots. And as a curious developer, I took the chance and created my own version. Using Web-LLM and Transformers.js to provide browser-based text-generation models on desktop and mobile, I built a minimalist self-hosted search app on which an AI analyses the results, comments on them and responds to your query summarising the info. In the backend, it still queries a real search engine, but besides that,…

    2023 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Peer-to-peer web search over the YaCy network▲5

    SearXNG — a privacy-respecting, open metasearch engine

    13d ago · search.my-yacy-node.org · its alternatives →

15. 15IB
    I built a 2B-page search engine, independent of Google/Bing▲8

    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 · its alternatives →

16. 16
    Rust Based Per-Token Late Interaction Dense Search▲8

    Happy to release FastPlaid, which aim to ease and accelerate ColBERT and ColPali retrieval

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

17. 17TS
    The Social Search Engine, A crowd-sourced, anonymous social search tool▲9

    2021 · thesocialsearchengine.com · its alternatives →

18. 18AA
    Anythings – A Smart Devices Search Engine (featured on Product Hunt)▲8

    2015 · anythings.co · its alternatives →

19. 19
    Omnity▲3

    Next-generation semantic search engine

    2016 · omnity.io · its alternatives →

20. 20MO
    Metarank – open-source hybrid search with LLMs▲7

    A small demo for a Metarank open-source project I'm maintaining.

    2023 · demo.metarank.ai · its alternatives →

21. 21FK
    Free Keyword Tool Using Google, YouTube, Amazon and Other API Hacks▲9

    2016 · freekeywordtool.net · its alternatives →

22. 22BR
    Built RealTime Search for Google Chrome▲6

    2013 · apoorv.quora.com · its alternatives →

23. 23
    (gle) a tiny but completely functional Google searcher lib in python▲9

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

24. 24SF
    Supersimplesearch – Fastest way to add search to your website▲9

    2020 · getsupersimplesearch.com · its alternatives →

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 →