from Hacker News

Creating a search engine for fun and because Google sucks

by vsgherzi on 9/8/24, 7:26 AM with 41 comments

  • by jsnell on 9/8/24, 8:07 AM

    Creating a thin, non-working wrapper around DuckDuckGo as a "hire me" ad, claiming it's a search engine and mentioning Google in the headline because it'll get more clicks.

  • by ramigb on 9/8/24, 7:47 AM

    So your "search engine" uses Google and DuckDuckGo to get results? and you are creating it because "Google sucks"? Am I missing something here?

  • by TheFragenTaken on 9/8/24, 8:01 AM

    The phonebook capabilities of pretty much all Google alternatives suck. Google is currently the only search engine that actually works for local queries (i.e. phone repair in <local town>).

    Alternatives while probably fine in America, suck in the Nordics. I think people forget just how much search traffic happens in this category.

  • by r_singh on 9/8/24, 8:04 AM

    I've been using SearXNG[1] via Perplexica[2] and I couldn't be happier. It replaced Google and ChatGPT/Perplexity type search engines for me and it's the first tool I use for question answer type searches.

    [1] - https://docs.searxng.org [2] - https://github.com/ItzCrazyKns/Perplexica

  • by randomman1131 on 9/8/24, 8:25 AM

    As someone who cares about their online searches actually being good, fast and private, I cannot recommend SearXNG more. https://github.com/searxng/searxng/

    It's a metasearch engine that can query multiple search providers at once, including google, so you're not missing out on the good results you expect. Pick an instance at https://searx.space/ and tell your friends!

  • by sneak on 9/8/24, 7:50 AM

    I have been thinking about this. I’d like to index the blogosphere and some knowledge base sites and stuff and exclude most of the Top1000 websites.

    I imagine I could do it on consumer hardware for less than $10-20k.

    Perhaps common crawl has done much of the heavy lifting already and I just have an indexing task.

  • by delanyoyoko on 9/8/24, 8:19 AM

    https://vincents.dev/blog/creating-a-search-engine/?

    I visited the page on mobile and I have to scroll horizontally back and forth before I can read?

    That is not fun at all.

  • by roschdal on 9/8/24, 7:44 AM

    Google is a fine search engine.

  • by sam29681749 on 9/8/24, 8:33 AM

    This article doesn't scale to fit the window on Firefox on android.

  • by nprateem on 9/8/24, 8:14 AM

    Duckduckgo is now particularly riddled by AI spam. The top 5 summaries for lots of searches now begin with some variation of "In the fast-moving world of...". Utter shit.

    It'd be so easy to filter I wonder why they/Microsoft don't bother. Oh, wait...