Alternatives
Products that do what Trovu.net – Command-Line Web Search with 1000 Sites and Full Privacy does
Being bored with filling out the same web forms again and again, I created trovu.net. It's a command-line web search tool that uses curated and personal shortcuts, organized by namespaces, and supports multiple and typed arguments for efficient keyboard use. Trovu prioritizes privacy; all searches are processed locally, without queries to the Trovu server. It's open-source, AGPL-licensed. Here's a quick demo of how it works, you can also watch a video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOUNhCion9M ▶ gfl ber, ibiza, 28, 6 – this takes me directly to Google Flights, listing…
- 1TA
Hi HN, Trogon is a project to generate a TUI for command line apps. It presents the arguments, options, and switches as a form. Editing the form generates a command line, which you can then run with a keypress. I'm a lover of the command line. But I can recall only a fraction of the switches for most commands I use. I would love it if there was a TUI available for most commands. Trogon currently works with Python and the Click library, but I would like it to cover more of the Python ecosystem and also generate TUIs for apps not written in Python. More information in the repository. Let me…
2023 · github.com
- 2AS
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
- 3FS
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
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- 5IM
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
- 6DS
2019 · github.com
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hey guys, wanted to show one of my side projects i just made public. the idea is basically another osint tool for pentesters and bug bounty hunters. it watches certificate transparency logs and checks newly-seen domains for exposed stuff like .env files, open .git dirs, config files, db dumps and so on, and puts whatever it finds into a searchable db. you just search a domain (or part of one) and see what's exposed. it's read-only and free. one thing i've been thinking about adding is a way to register for certain keywords and get notified when something new shows up for that search. would…
Jul 2026 · search.cerast-intelligence.com
- 8MN
2013 · shortdomainsearch.net
- 9AM
Allsearch is a tool I made after getting fed up with Google's search results and reading up on conversations on HN about the state of search on the internet. This is a tool I made as a spiritual successor to GnodSearch (https://www.gnod.com/search/), which I've seen in a couple conversations about search on HN. GnodSearch is great, but a bit barebones in terms of looks and functionality; Allsearch is my attempt to build off of it. Similar to Gnod, Allsearch allows you to apply any given search query to a search engine of your choice (either through only keystrokes, or via…
2022 · allsear.ch
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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
- 12IB
I work on R00M 101, a Reddit-based OSINT profiler. While building it, I realized most open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools are scattered across GitHub, outdated blog posts, or random Discords. So I put together a public-facing directory of 100+ OSINT tools used by analysts, journalists, and security folks, free, filterable, and categorized by risk, platform, and use case. The idea was to make something useful and no-friction. Built with static HTML + SQL backend + a lot of caffeine. Would love feedback on how to improve the UX or tool curation. If anyone wants to contribute tools or help…
2025 · r00m101.com
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I made this site for myself, SimpleSearch.info, as new default browser page. I’m not sure if it actually _saves_ time or clicks (though, for me, it saves at least one click per search), but I find the search experience more pleasant. On desktop, it’s nice to just have these search bars as the first thing that pops up in a new window or tab vs clicking bookmarks in the toolbar or elsewhere then searching. Similarly, on mobile, I like just clicking on one icon for all my searches. The vast majority of my web browsing begins with a search or LLM query. I’m curious if this is helpful to anyone…
2025 · simplesearch.info
- 14CL
Hey HN, this is a side-project I've been working on for my senior year independent work in CS. Would appreciate any comments or feedback. www.aperator.com Thanks!
2012
- 15FC
i saw last week that if you include a curse word in your Google search query it won't serve an AI overview, serves less ads, and less "zero click" Google properties. so I made a little tool to help facilitate this search, saving you literally hundreds of microseconds!
2025 · fuckingsearch.com
- 16UC
Hi HN, https://companies.bx.tc My colleague and I put together this tool for easily searching UK company data. We run a few server side batches daily to extract data from various government sources before linking it all together in (what is now) a fairly large database. We're also using this project as a way to test out a new JS UI library we built (similar to Vue, but a bit faster) to see how it stands up in a real project. We'd love to hear your feedback and any ideas you have for how we can improve the dashboard! Thanks :)
2020
- 17RA
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
- 18SN
2020 · searchmysite.net
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- 20UI
Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com
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- 22IB
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
- 23TC
2022 · github.com
- 248B
Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…
Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app
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