Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

Site reliability and “HN hug of death”

• Multiple users report both SearchaPage and Seek.Ninja returning errors or being down, speculating it’s due to Hacker News traffic.
• The creator confirms usage spiked ~20x week-over-week, with context expansion (not search itself) as the main bottleneck, and calls it a “trial by fire.”
• Some users saw good, “impressive” results before the overload; others switched to using it as default immediately and praised speed and privacy.

DIY search engines: feasibility and scope

• Many are excited that someone is self‑hosting a search engine at home, seeing it as a welcome mix of innovation and cloud‑skepticism.
• Others argue that competing with Google is unrealistic: search now involves huge infra, advanced ranking, maps, and various verticals—far beyond “two people in a dorm.”
• Several note that repeating Google’s original success is unlikely because the web and user expectations are very different today.

Crawling and indexing challenges

• Commenters emphasize that the hardest part isn’t ranking but crawling an adversarial web: JS-heavy sites, logins, Cloudflare/CAPTCHAs, and big platforms that only welcome Google’s bot.
• The project reportedly builds on Common Crawl (~2B pages) plus a more targeted native crawler; freshness is cited as the main issue with relying solely on Common Crawl.
• Ideas discussed: open, non-profit web indices; crowdsourced crawling (Yacy, Common Crawl); domain lists (ICANN zone files, curated domain indices on GitHub).

AI, vectors, and user expectations

• One side claims the “underlying problem has changed”: PageRank is gamed, and modern search “needs” LLM-based assessment and synthesized answers.
• Others strongly push back, preferring raw results and paying for engines (e.g., Kagi) specifically to avoid AI overviews.
• There’s disagreement over whether ordinary users actually want LLM-style answers by default, with some asserting younger demographics increasingly prefer chat-style search, others skeptical.

Alternative search engines and sentiment

• Kagi is frequently mentioned as a polished, paid alternative; users praise its quality and customizability, while critics call it slow, expensive, or overhyped.
• Meta-discussion arises about “shilling,” effort justification, and how much advocacy is just happy users vs. marketing.
• Some note small, niche engines (e.g., Marginalia, news-focused engines) as valuable complementary efforts rather than Google “rivals.”