I made a search engine for the indieweb
Hi there! I made a project for pure joy called Indieseas.net. I made it because I disliked how search engines completely ignore smaller websites, prioritizing ads and businesses. That said, I decided to make my very own search engine! But, how could I keep business websites outside the system? The solution were 88x31 buttons. These are images or gifs that were used back in the days to connect websites between eachother. This was useful because search engines weren't very bad in the times. Thankfully, people still use them a lot nowadays! So, I whipped up a program in Typescript using Bun…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi there! I made a project for pure joy called Indieseas.net. I made it because I disliked how search engines completely ignore smaller websites, prioritizing ads and businesses. That said, I decided to make my very own search engine! But, how could I keep business websites outside the system? The solution were 88x31 buttons. These are images or gifs that were used back in the days to connect websites between eachother. This was useful because search engines weren't very bad in the times. Thankfully, people still use them a lot nowadays! So, I whipped up a program in Typescript using Bun that used Cloudflare Workers to scrape pages, and then extract links, text, meta tags (title and description) and the images, which I later processed to verify they were actual 88x31 buttons. Now, this setup (multiple bun workers) was super laggy and haggled a lot of resources, so naturellement I decided to rewrite it in... RUST! Now, don't get me wrong, this was way harder than expected, but nonetheless I got a pretty decent result. Now, indexing. It was prolly the easiest part of them all, since I integrated it directly within the scraper and all I did was "docker build" and code a mini embedding API using model2vec/potion-base-32M. I then spun up an instance of the same Docker container and voilá, I've got myself an embedding api that's fairly quick. The last step was querying, for which I made an api directly in the Astro frontend. It's a single SQL query and it works really, really badly. I got to fix it! But the "discover a website" and the "button gallery" functions were very well received by peers and friends. That's all! Thanks for coming to my mini TED Talk.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IMI'm building a non-profit search engine2021 · github.com · ▲441
- MAmade a html5 game, polished it many many times2011 · hotbazooka.com · ▲211
hi all, I've always wanted to make my own game, but couldn't afford a thousand-dollar adobe (flash+photoshop) license. I'm not a talented programmer, have no degree in CS. But I understand some elements of design. So I got me a copy of ImpactJS, and after about 5 months of steep learning curve (at least for me), I managed to come up with a game. I also integrated it with a highscore and badge system, similar to what you get at Kongregate. You need to login with Google/OpenID to earn badges/scores. link is: http://www.hotbazooka.com/privatejoe hope to hear some feedback/questions from you guys!
- AIAn index of indie web/blog indexesMay 2026 · theindex.fyi · ▲154
I saw a comment here about how there are so many indexes of indie sites, blogs, etc but there wasn't an index of all the indexes. So I built it. It doesn't require a log in, just go browse! I've curated about 30 or so, but there is a submission form if there are ones I am missing. Also happy to take UI improvements because I am not great in that area!
- RARunnaroo – A new web search engine2020 · ▲20
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…
- IBI built a 2B-page search engine, independent of Google/Bing2025 · ▲8
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…
- IBI built a search engine for independent websites2024 · rawweb.org · ▲5
Hi, folks. How would you define the "Golden Age" of the internet? In my opinion, it’s when people ran personal websites, blogs, or portfolios to share thoughts and stories. These websites could be unstable, slow, or "ugly", but they were the true digital gardens of individuals, making the internet colorful. It's such a pity that most of the content from independent websites is hidden in the corner. Therefore, I built RawWeb (https://rawweb.org) to index all these hidden gems. It collects content through feeds (RSS, Atom) and sorts the results by relevance. It also features an OPML…
More growth this month
the category →
AstraPixels▲267A pixel-art solar system at its real current positions.
Growth · 29d ago · astrapixels.com
Launched alongside, June 2025
the whole month →- IM
Hey HN! Pilots everywhere are required to keep a logbook of all their flying hours, aircraft, airports, and so on. Since I track everything digitally (some people still just use paper logbooks!), I put together some data visualizations and a few 3D globes to show my flying history. This globe is probably my favourite so far: https://jameshard.ing/pilot/globes/all If you’ve got ideas for other graphs or ways to show this kind of data, I’d love to hear them!
Life & fun · 2025 · jameshard.ing
Stunning presentations with AI. No design skills required.
AI · 2025 · chroniclehq.com
Build native mobile apps for iOS and Android without code.
Dev tools · 2025 · bble.io
All your connections, across all your socials.
AI · 2025 · pally.com
- WC
I was the main contributor to workout.lol, an open-source fitness app to easily build a workout routine. The project had traction (1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks, ~20K visits/month), but was eventually sold due to video licensing hurdles. The new owner stopped maintaining it, and the repo went abandoned. Over the next 9 months, I sent 15 emails to try to save it : no replies. Feature requests & issues were ignored. The community was left with a "broken" tool let's say. I couldn't just let it die So I built the new version from scratch with the same open-source spirit, but a better…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com