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Show HN: I built a 2B-page search engine, independent of Google/Bing

8 points by Chief_Searcha ↗ HN
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 pipeline is a hybrid model, using a traditional lexical index for the heavy lifting and lightweight LLMs for specific tasks like query expansion and re-ranking. It's an experiment in capital efficiency and digital sovereignty—proving you don't need Big Tech APIs to compete. I’m looking for feedback on search result relevance, speed, and the clarity of the privacy models. Please try it out and let me know what you think. Links: https://searcha.page https://seek.ninja Thanks, Ryan

4 comments

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mindctrl-org
Hi, cool project. A little feedback, as I only spent a few seconds there. The search results need to populate considerably faster. The weird delay, animation, and layout shifting makes it all feel cheap.

The first results were good for the search I did. However, I went back and searched for something else entirely, and I got results similar to the first search. That seems bad, since they were unrelated searches.

Now I can't search anything because it's timing out.

FerkiHN
Great work, especially since you did it yourself, you really put your heart and soul into the project and not in vain, it is truly unique and I appreciate it, good luck with further development, you can add local pages (like the most popular services) this will save mobile traffic.
phillipseamore
This is great. May I suggest you post a direct link to seek.ninja if this doesn't get the upvotes it deserves today.

Did you crawl yourself or using common crawl?

ofalkaed
Really appreciate that when searching for commodities/goods the results are not dominated by amazon/etsy/ebay sellers, very low on multiple results from a single domain in general. Solves my biggest gripe with search engines but have only done a few quick searches with seek.ninja so far.

The one thing that I would like to see is the "More results from <site>," links for sites with a lot of results. :site works so not a deal breaker, just a would be nice.