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Sightline

Shodan-style search for real-world infra using OSM Data

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Hi HN,I built *Sightline*, a Shodan-style search engine for *physical-world infrastructure*.Shodan makes it easy to explore exposed internet services. Sightline applies the same idea to the real world, using OpenStreetMap as the data source.You can search things like:* “telecom towers in karnataka” * “power plants near mumbai” * “data centers in paris france”or use structured queries:* `type:telecom operator:airtel region:karnataka` * `type:data_center operator:google`Sightline:* uses Overpass API for querying OSM features * uses Nominatim for resolving countries, regions, and cities * avoids hardcoded geography * uses deterministic, rule-based parsing (no AI inference)Repo: https://github.com/ni5arga/sightline Try it out: https://sightline-maps.vercel.app

HN · launched Jan 25, 2026 · 26 upvotes (top 31%) · 0 views

Niche: vertical search engines and directories · 98 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▼ -46% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Security
  • Search & retrieval
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 98 launches in vertical search engines and directories →

Could you build this?

Partial A web UI translating queries into Overpass API queries is easy to vibe code, but handling large-scale geospatial indexing and sub-second global queries across hundreds of gigabytes of OpenStreetMap data requires specialized GIS infrastructure.

What it would actually take: A production version requires an ETL pipeline converting OSM planet files (using tools like Osmosis or osmium) into a specialized spatial database like PostGIS or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch with geospatial indexes. The difficult parts include managing high-throughput spatial query parsing, geospatial polygon containment queries, and caching infrastructure to avoid overloading public Overpass endpoints.

Discussion

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 34 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #12 of 35 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Looks like the first mover among its competitors.

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