Nicheloom

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My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no AI, & all DDG bangs

Details

External ID
46417748
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no AI, & all DDG bangs
Website domain
nilch.org
Launched
Dec. 29, 2025
Cohort
—
Upvotes
199
Upvotes percentile
0.950381679389313
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

I've been working on a little open source [1] search engine, nilch. I noticed that nearly all well known search engines, including the alternative ones, tend to be run by companies of various sizes with the goal to make money, so they either fill your results with ads or charge you money, and I dislike this because search is the backbone of the internet and should not be commercial, so it runs in a not-for-profit style and aims to survive on donations. Additionally I'm personally really sick of AI in my search results so I got rid of that, and I wanted DuckDuckGo bangs so it supports all of them. Like many alternative search engines, it is fully private.Sadly, it currently does not have its own index but rather uses the Brave search API. Once I'm in a financial position that it's possible, I would absolutely love to build a completely new index from the ground up which is open source, as well as an open source ranking and search algorithm, to back it.I posted on Reddit and got an amazing amount of feedback which I implemented a number of feature requests, so I would really like your ideas, critiques, and bug reports as well. Thank you and sorry for the long post![1] https://github.com/UnmappedStack/nilch

Enrichment

Theme
indie hacker passion projects
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Search & retrieval
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
ad-free search engine without ai
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial The minimal search interface and DuckDuckGo bang redirection are straightforward to code, but building and hosting an actual web crawler and indexer with no external APIs is an extensive distributed systems challenge.

What it would actually take: Building an independent search engine requires a distributed web crawler (e.g., in Rust or Go), an inverted index (such as Tantivy or Elasticsearch), and distributed storage across a server cluster. The hard part is crawling billions of web pages, deduplication, spam filtering, and relevance ranking algorithms (BM25/PageRank) on tight hardware constraints without third-party APIs. It requires experienced distributed systems engineering and infrastructure management.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Brave Search, Google, Marginalia Search

Concerns raised: Wrapper/interface over Brave API, not independent search engine, Marketing slogan 'No AI, no ads, just search' is overused trope, Unclear how it's better than existing alternatives like Brave Search, Lacks custom index compared to true search engines, Still requires upstream data source for results

Feature requests: Add cobalt bang to global list for non-Kagi users, Build independent search index as separate phase, Support bang operators at arbitrary locations like DuckDuckGo, Distributed search index capability

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 65 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #3 of 66 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 57 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product