Show HN: A search engine for your personal network of high-quality websites

I looked at the logo to see what kind of non-sense you were talking about, but you are absolutely correct. That logo really does belong on a shampoo bottle.

I think you're referring largely to women's beauty/fashion products, not mens; I haven't noticed this type of logo with the products I use or on clothes I buy. And to whatever degree the logo might be feminine, I certainly don't think that's a bad thing.

People should push the envelope and not just do the same thing as everybody else! (Obviously do so with intent, but I wouldn't assume there wasn't any.)

I laughed out loud after reading your comment. I did not put a lot of thought into designing the logo. Thanks for the video.

Make sure to avoid The Helvetica Scenario though.

I've recently been getting into Brave Goggles, and they have a `discard` feature so any site you don't explicitly mention get discarded from the results. For eg., see https://github.com/brave/goggles-quickstart/blob/main/goggle...

They use 1000 domains from Hacker News posts and do ranking and all that, but for your purpose, you can just have

    $discard
    $boost,site=wikipedia.org
    $boost,site=stackexchange.com
    $boost,site=gitlab.com

> Anyone know of other good solutions in this area for restricting to just {wikipedia, stackexchange, gitlab}?

Kagi Search lenses:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

Excuse the self-promotion but this can be done with Mojeek Focus [0]. This capability is also available through our search engine API.

[0] https://www.mojeek.com/focus/

I'm not aware of any other products, but I think the Bing Custom Search API might be able to solve your problem.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/bing-custom-search...

I've been using a self-hosted instance of SearXNG (a meta search engine) to exclude a lot of spammy sites from search results. I'm not sure if you can force it to only search a list of domains, but might be worth looking into.

Thanks!

I still remember the day I saw your project on HN [1]. Your work encouraged me to start exploring my search engine ideas. I can't believe you are commenting on my work.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764

Thanks for your feedback. The LLM part is a bit buggy since I rushed its release. Currently, I am rewriting the entire LLM section to ensure that it is both fast and reliable.

May I ask how many queries you would like before signing up?

The market for discovery in general is really under served almost across all areas.

Magazines and to some extent brick and mortar stores used to serve the product discovery market but right now it's so hard to find a product that fits your needs.

So much bait-and-switch nonsense and straight up scams.

Doesn't help that many e-commerce sites are such a pain in the ass to use. 45 second page loads with an additional 15 seconds of random layout shifts is comparatively good. Product listings that show like 6 items per screen, in a random order with useless and truncated descriptions and no useful search function.

I don't understand how they're getting any sales at all.

Because Google didn't have enough time in 25 years to fix that. Or they make more money on ads than straight referrals.

I haven't used it for a while, but there is a website called 'staticice' that appears to still be an e-commerce price/product search engine. I'm not sure how it works, maybe the sites sign up, or provide prices, or staticice scrapes. It's mostly for gadgets and computer parts but has worked well enough a few times.

Similar to pcpartpicker but much less 'utility', just pure search for model w/ price.

I wonder how one would discover websites like this currently though -- it's certainly not in google's interest to make the top result infobox something like "Didn't find what you are looking for? Try searching using this other site: goodcommercesearch.net" !

I am working on building e-commerce search engine https://itemfinder.ae/.

Would be great If you can share you feedback and suggestions

There is for the german speaking countries and it is called Geizhals[1]. It allows A LOT of detailed filters for different categories and shows you websites offering that product. Most times when I need something I just input my criteria for the thing I want to buy and look for the best price to performance ratio of the products that fulfil my criteria.

[1] https://geizhals.de/

There sort of is, at least in Europe with Google's CSS providers. IIRC there's a few dozen aggregators and aggregators must have at least 50 merchants in order to be a CSS partner. The products are shown as a carousel and can undercut Google by 20% due to tax/competition reasons. I'm not fluent on the underlying reasons- the results are also on Google shopping.

There are price comparison websites, high-quality reviews (rtings, notebookcheck, maybe wirecutter), deals sharing websites (pepper et al).

Amazon is that for most people.

Yes, this is going to be our next feature. In fact, this is the exact idea that I prototyped a couple of months ago using Twitter data, but we are completely off from Twitter now [1].

1 - https://twitter.com/Vignesh_warar/status/1573020208289132545

The pricing page shows me $15/month for 800 searches. There's no way that pricing is going to work. Even setting aside the issue of getting people to pay that much, who is going to track their number of searches to make sure they don't go over the limit? And nobody that does 10 searches a day - which is about the limit if you don't want to think about this - is going to pay for a search engine.

Agreed. Pricing needs improvement. Not just in the bang-for-your-buck sense, but the per-search model. Right now I have the following questions:

1. What counts as a search? If I go to page 2 of search results, does that use up another search?

2. If I have to refine my search to get the results I actually want, can I get a refund for all the searches I made that didn't predict how the query would be interpreted?

3. What happens when I meet the limit? Am I charged per-search? Can I just no longer search?

4. If I meet the limit and then go to DDG, or Google or whatever, are you okay with that? What if the results there are good enough that I start wondering whether or not I want to pay $15/month for a search engine? How much is retaining a paying customer worth to you?

5. If I have to start counting my search numbers, I'm very quickly going to learn to search less. And the better I get at searching less, the less need I'll have for a search engine, let alone a paid service. Are you worried about your pricing model pushing people towards non-search engine solutions of exploring the web and/or finding web pages?

As far as I'm concerned: Charge whatever you need to charge to be profitable. This can only work if it's self-sustaining without external influence. A good compromise might be to offer a psychologically attractive price point for less searches, and a slightly higher one for more searches at a round number - 800 is the weirdest number :)

Agreed. There is room for different plans, but we want some search metric to define the pricing.

On a side note, I truly did not want to put up a paywall. But, it is necessary to support our servers.

Yes, except we want a shared resource for an index so we aren't all crawling sites in excess.

Eg, here's the latest central or distributed DB, the site in your personal list is on it so we don't need to send the crawler there because it has already been indexed and is crawled by someone else.

I have a pretty large personal blocklist for Google, search is pretty usable for me now.

Thanks, updated.

Hey, could you please link the search results page? I'd be happy to take a look and remove any commercialized sites from the network. The best part about this idea is that if there's a low-quality site, we can block the previous node, which will block all the other sites it was linking to. If a site is linking to a poor-quality site, there's a chance they might link to other poor-quality websites. You might ask whether this will also remove good sites from your network, but a good site will always find a way to enter the network.

The blocking feature has not been shipped yet.

As of right now, the Grasp Network builder won't consider outgoing links from UGC (User-generated content) websites such as Reddit, Twitter, etc. as it would bring in junk, as you mentioned. I am maintaining a full list of UGC sites.

I am not sure. The thing I want to build is far different from ChatGPT plugins. Could you please be more specific? Why do you think ChatGPT plugins would be direct competitor?

That’s what they said about Dropbox and google drive — amazingly both still exist.

Thanks, updated.

By default, Grasp uses the HackerNews network, which is built from the top sites from HackerNews.

Here is a page about how it works: https://usegrasp.com/how

> I've always thought it would be great if I could curate my own search index.

You can... kinda. YaCy is pretty much dying as a project and network. But it still works if you want to have your own independent search. It's great for indexing specific endpoints you care about + N degrees of links. (Like your list of RSS, browser history, etc.)

Yes, the search results are a combination of our own index and a third-party index, but our future goal is to be fully dependent on our own index.

To think about pricing, it helps to think about:

1. How much signal do you get from pricing? For example, how much customer commitment do certain price points bring? How much does real world usage help? Strike a balance.

2. You want to attract early adopters. What pricing models are worth trying? How important is offsetting costs right now? Is traction and adoption more important, and if so, how much more? What metrics can help measure how to balance these goals?

3. How can you handle the scenario where you are lucky enough to get a lot of interest? How do last long enough to test your business without going bust? Your pricing model should be driven by these scenarios and your risk preference.

4. Leave yourself ways to adjust pricing without pissing people off. So if your initial pricing is tentative, be clear on that. Or let people lock in a monthly rate now in case it goes up later.

5. Create an internal quantitative model that predicts your expenses across some likely future scenarios. Tie your pricing model to some multiple of that. This can double as smart business planning to think about risk and what it takes to reach your goals.

6. Consider adjusting pricing based on how intensively someone uses your service, not simply based on search quantity, but your end-to-end cost. Recall that Twitter’s infrastructure costs are dramatically driven by a relatively small number of users with high fan out. What aspects of your offering are the most expensive? How can you mitigate these costs? How can you map these pricing differences to features that customers care about?

(Last edits: 12:31 pm EDT)

P.S. I created a search engine that never took off about 10 years ago. These questions would have helped me.

Another thread a with pricing ideas : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35827254 : “$4.99/mo with an annual of $49.99” or “$9.99 /mo ($99.99 annual)”

Could you please share the specific error message you are facing, perhaps from the console?

Yes, absolutely, it will be our next feature!

Link to my related comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35826540#:~:text=Yes%2C....

LLM part is currently under load. I am currently doing a full rewrite for it, which will improve its speed and reliability.