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Sightline

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

Details

External ID
46751797
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Sightline
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Jan. 25, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
26
Upvotes percentile
0.6903820816864296
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

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

Enrichment

Theme
real estate and local intelligence platforms
Vertical
Security
Function
Search & retrieval
Audience
B2B
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
infrastructure search from open street map data
Manually corrected
False

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

1 comment analyzed.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 13 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #7 of 14 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Looks like the first mover among its competitors.

Other launches for this product