I'm building a non-profit search engine

In plain words

This is a non-profit search engine project launched in late 2021 and hosted on GitHub. It appears to be built by developers interested in creating a search alternative outside the commercial space. The project is available for review and contribution through its GitHub repository, making it accessible to those who want to examine or participate in its development. It targets users and developers who prefer open-source search solutions.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

• AN
  A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time2022 · swurl.com · ▲572
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  My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no AI, & all DDG bangsDec 2025 · nilch.org · ▲199

  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…

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  An open source web crawler for the Mwmbl non-profit search engine2022 · github.com · ▲6

  A browser extension that can be installed by volunteers to participate in mwmbl distributed crawling. - mwmbl/crawler-extension

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  DontBeEvil.rip: Search, for developers (API, expressions, CLI)2022 · ▲269

  I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

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  Turn any website into a knowledge base for LLMs2024 · embedding.io · ▲305

  I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...

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  Highly cost-efficient search engine in Rust2021 · github.com · ▲61

  Cloud-native OSS search engine for observability. Contribute to quickwit-oss/quickwit development by creating an account on GitHub.

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  /dev/null▲468

  a social network for devs

  Dev tools · 2d ago · dev-null.sh

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  Whiteboard (YC W26) – an open-source IDE for thoughtful software design▲423

  open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.

  Dev tools · 27d ago · github.com

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  Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things▲411

  Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.

  Dev tools · 25d ago · github.com

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  OpenBot▲362

  Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer

  Dev tools · 22d ago · openbot.run

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  Talanoa▲340

  Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…

  Dev tools · 20d ago · talanoa.email

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  CoreSpeed▲332

  One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools

  Dev tools · 27d ago · corespeed.io

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  Magic Sidebar by BlackMagic.so▲1,084

  Powerful enhanced experience for Twitter

  Life & fun · 2021 · blackmagic.so

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  I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia▲979

  A beautiful, clean, modern web UI for Wikipedia. Enhance your Wikipedia experience with a redesigned look, new features and customization.

  Life & fun · 2021 · modernwiki.app

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  thirdweb▲897

  Build web3 apps and games, easily

  Dev tools · 2021 · thirdweb.com

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  Emoji to Scale▲713

  Your favorite emojis. To scale (more or less).

  Life & fun · 2021 · javier.xyz

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  Alfread▲641

  Actually read articles saved for later

  Work · 2021

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  BitsForDigits▲624

  A partial buyout marketplace free for bootstrapped founders

  Commerce · 2021 · flippa.com