Alternatives
Products that do what Surf – open-source Web Access for LLMs does
SURF (Search Utility & Reading Framework) is an open-source API that bridges LLMs with the web. It provides a standardized interface for web search and content processing that preserves formatting of tables, code, and complex layouts. Key features: - Multiple search providers (SearXNG, DuckDuckGo, Brave) - HTML cleaning and smart content extraction - Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for Claude and other AI assistants - Self-deployable with minimal setup (Docker, bare metal, cloud) - API key authentication I built this to make it easier to add web capabilities to LLM applications…
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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
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Hi HN, We participated at the Mozilla WSOH (http://wsoh.eventbrite.com/) over the summer. It was a hackathon organized by Mozilla for interns all over Silicon Valley with an attendance of over 300+ interns from Facebook, Google, etc. A friend and I made SurfControl and were the winners of the hackathon. We just pushed our product live and would love to get feedback! ------------- About SurfControl: "SurfControl is an add-on that shows you how you waste time online, and gives you tools to block or limit your time spent on different websites." It is a Firefox add-on and can be downloaded at…
2011
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2013 · surfly.com
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I've built an airgapped Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for question-answering on documents, running entirely offline with local inference. Using Llama 3, Mistral, and Gemini, this setup allows secure, private NLP on your own machine. Perfect for researchers, data scientists, and developers who need to process sensitive data without cloud dependencies. Built with Llama C++, LangChain, and Streamlit, it supports quantized models and provides a sleek UI for document processing. Check it out, contribute, or suggest new features!
2024 · github.com
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Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
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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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2023 · programming.dev
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hey hn, I built an open-source Perplexity clone that can run local LLMs and cloud LLMs. It's fully self-hostable through Docker and uses ollama to support local LLMs. The demo video in the repository shows me running it locally with llama3 on my M1 Macbook Pro. I'm open to any suggestions or feedback, thanks!
2024 · github.com
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I built TraceAIO, an open-source tool that prompts LLMs on your behalf and tells you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini mention your brand — and which competitors and sources show up instead. Yeah, this category smells a bit like a grift, same as early SEO. And I think over time it will become just SEO again, and become about good content. The tool just helps you monitor over time. It queries the browser products through real browser sessions, not APIs, runs on Docker, with an MCP server so you can query your own data through an LLM. No business model, Apache 2.0, self hosted. If you…
Jun 2026 · traceaio.org
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Hi! Been working on DialtoneApp, a free domain scanning tool to see how your site does with all the new rules for AI SEO. Also known as AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) the A can also stand for "Agent"! It's a whole new world out there and we haven't even gotten to agents.json files and the new "b2b" (bot to bot) commerce part. But there are some standards starting to take shape with llms.txt and using things like: on all your html pages to have this other markdown version. We list the top 300 sites in terms of how well they follow all the new rules.…
Apr 2026
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Dear HN Community, I am a long time fan and first-time contributor. I just launched a developer focused semantic search platform and wanted to share it with the community. The idea is simple: upload structured or unstructured documents, select the fields you want to index and tag as metadata, and instantly get a clean search API you can use in your own app. Here is what it currently supports: - Manage your own tenants and projects - Upload .json and .txt files (support for .pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .yml, etc. coming soon) - Expose 3 APIs: search, upload document (embeddings), and delete document -…
2025 · aisearch.vpuna.com
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