Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Worldwide Startup Search Engine
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Worldwide Startup Search Engine launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
First Search▲1,093The world's best startup advice, curated and searchable.
2017 · review.firstround.com · its alternatives →
- 2
ProblemHunt▲552Hi HN, I’m a solo founder. I built ProblemHunt after noticing a common pattern: many founders start with ideas and solutions, but don’t spend enough time understanding real problems. ProblemHunt is a simple place where people share problems they actually face in work or life. Developers and founders can browse these problems and use them as a starting point for building products. So far: – ~5,000 users – 150+ real problems submitted – 100% organic growth This is still early, and I’m trying to understand if this is genuinely useful. I’d really appreciate feedback: – Would you use something…
Oct 2025 · problemhunt.pro · its alternatives →
- 3AD
We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
2024 · hn.trieve.ai · its alternatives →
- 4
- 5WU
hey y'all -- can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks? :D we built it using an investor platform called Harmonic.ai to gather startup data, then contextualize it so that job seekers could find out about the most exciting startups hiring first (like if they just raised, growing headcount fast, have an ex-unicorn founder, etc). pretty sure we're the first platform doing anything like this. anyway, let me know what you think. really excited to launch this thing soon! getting feedback from the hn community first is really fun :)
2022 · joinmaasive.com · its alternatives →
- 6
YC has it▲219Describe your problem, get the YC startup that solves it
Jul 2026 · ychasit.com · its alternatives →
- 7RS
Explore any niche. Discover pain points, content opportunities, and what solutions people are eager to pay for.
2022 · gummysearch.com · its alternatives →
- 8
I've been working on a little open source [1] search engine, nilch. I noticed that nearly all well known search engines, including the alternative ones, tend to be run by companies of various sizes with the goal to make money, so they either fill your results with ads or charge you money, and I dislike this because search is the backbone of the internet and should not be commercial, so it runs in a not-for-profit style and aims to survive on donations. Additionally I'm personally really sick of AI in my search results so I got rid of that, and I wanted DuckDuckGo bangs so it supports all of…
Dec 2025 · nilch.org · its alternatives →
- 9
I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.
2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com · its alternatives →
- 10FS
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 · its alternatives →
- 11
Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…
2024 · hackersearch.net · its alternatives →
- 12
Startup DB▲175Search great, curated posts by investors and operators
2016 · docs.google.com · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
Generate startup ideas on a particular topic, based on insights from Hacker News comments.
2023 · hn-ideas.tjcx.me · its alternatives →
- 15FO
HN, I've been mostly lurking, semi-active on HN for over 4 years. For most of that time, I've been working on my startup, Learndot. I have always wanted to do a "Show HN" post, but I never thought it was ready. We've now finally launched web signup and using a freemium business model. I feel I can now post and offer something to the community (a new app to try out) and hopefully get good quality feedback. Here's the site: http://www.learndot.com Would appreciate any or all thoughts: From pricing/positioning, to design/performance. The app is written in Sproutcore and backed by an API written…
2013 · learndot.com · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17
Hey folks, There has been some talk about search engines here so I thought maybe I'd share a new project I'm working on. Built it partly to help me sell my own projects. Still a lot of work to be done but would be happy to get feedback. Very early phase so don't trust your life with it. Cheers --- Edit: if anyone needs a free/no CC account just DM me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/crufter/
2024 · singulatron.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Launch your product and get found on Google and in AI answers from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. SEO-ready product pages and AI-readable listings for…
May 2026 · scrolllaunch.com · its alternatives →
- 19
1000+ Places To Promote Your Startup
2022 · agarwaravi.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 20
StartupSubmitter▲100Submit your startup to every directory proven to boost SEO
2021 · startupsubmitter.com · its alternatives →
- 21
- 22FS
I started a newsletter sending out daily startup ideas. After a year, I transitioned to weekly ideas with more in-depth details. I recently posted all of them to the website and made them searchable. Check it out and let me know what you think. By providing more than just an idea, my hope is to help someone start their next business. https://www.startupsfromthebottom.com/
2020 · its alternatives →
- 23
Hey HN, I’m a solopreneur and have been in the SaaS space for the past 3 years. My last three startups failed, and a common challenge in all of them was figuring out how to reach my audience. SEO always seemed like the answer, but I didn’t know where to start. It felt overwhelming—so many technical terms like keyword research, clustering, SERP, semantics, topical authority… I could go on. That’s where my idea for my next startup came from: building an all-in-one SEO tool that’s easy to use and understand. The complexity of SEO is hidden behind a simple UI, and the only thing users need to do…
2025 · babylovegrowth.ai · its alternatives →
- 24NH
Hi HN - We're a small team of domainers that made Namethrive to help startups launch with killer names for less than the cost of a Macbook Pro. Our goal is to help entrepreneurs stop wasting time when it comes to picking out a name for their projects. So many startups and side projects that we see on HN (among other places) end up launching with poor names or obscure foreign TLDs, and we want to change that. We're hoping to significantly expand our selection in the coming weeks and may also be doing some domain giveaways on twitter soon, so stay tuned if you're interested.
2011 · its alternatives →
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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 →