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AI · August 12, 2025

Building a web search engine from scratch with 3B neural embeddings

End-to-end deep dive of the project, spanning a large GPU cluster, distributed RocksDB, and terabytes of sharded HNSW.

Building a web search engine from scratch with 3B neural embeddings launched on August 12, 2025 with 699 votes, #11 of 8,530 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

Visit blog.wilsonl.in ↗Alternativestop 1% of August 2025

In plain words

This is a technical guide for developers interested in creating a web search engine using 3 billion neural embeddings. It covers the foundational architecture and implementation details needed to build a search system from the ground up. The resource is designed for engineers and researchers who want to understand how modern embedding-based search engines work and implement their own version. It was published on Wilson L.'s blog in August 2025.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

A while back, I decided to undertake a project to challenge myself: build a web search engine from scratch. Aside from the fun deep dive opportunity, there were two motivators: A simple question I had was: why couldn't a search engine always result in top quality content? Such content may be rare, but the Internet's tail is long , and better quality results should rank higher than the prolific inorganic content and engagement bait you see today. Another pain point was that search engines often felt underpowered, closer to keyword matching than human-level intelligence. A reasonably complex or subtle query couldn't be answered by most search engines at all, but the ability to would be…from blog.wilsonl.in

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