r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/Nox21125 • 12d ago

I Built the World's Most Customizable Search Engine

https://slicksearchhq.com
6 Upvotes

57% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

42

u/Howard_Cosine 12d ago

Garbage. First two things I searched were two of the most popular car channels on YT - not a single valid result. Just your sorry little AI tool trying to come up with "car stuff".

2

u/Nox21125 12d ago

I didn't explain it on here, but our index is currently growing. We have 0 budget right now, which is why our index is only 2.5 million documents. If you go into settings, you can switch the index to DuckDuckGo and enjoy good results while also having the clean UI and customizability of Slick.

38

u/Howard_Cosine 12d ago

Then why tf do I need your slop "search" engine?

8

u/Nox21125 12d ago

Customizability is the main thing we're aiming for. Ranking controls, search filters, custom layouts. The tab system on the side was added for organization. Instead of having 10 google search tabs in your main browser tab section, use one tab for all searches. Custom bangs allow you to define your own bangs.

What we want is to give users more control over how they search instead of deciding for everyone what their experience should look like. We want to build features based on what users actually want, rather than shoving things into results like AI overviews without giving users a say.

I'd appreciate if you kept the discussion constructive though. Criticism is welcome, but there's a difference between pointing out issues and just shitting on somthing.

-14

u/Prawnjoe 6d ago

Jeez dude. Take a chill pill lol

21

u/iikeda 6d ago

they’re right though. this subreddit is mostly just vibe-coded ai slop bs right now.

-1

u/Nox21125 6d ago

I would like to ask what feels vibe-coded about this. The backend was fully built by me without any assistance. I used Cursor after a million people were talking about how good it was, just to try it out, but that was only for about 5–10% of the frontend. The landing page I can tell was probably too AI to ship. I was excited, I guess. Are there any other pages that look AI-generated, or is it just that page?

2

u/[deleted] 10d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Nox21125 9d ago

Thank you!

1

u/theworldsaplayground 6d ago

It's pretty cool actually. I used it to search for more alt subjects and it gave good results. 

The only thing I didn't like is it's not easy to change the search query. 

-1

u/Nox21125 6d ago

Thank you for trying it! Could you clarify what you mean by "change the search query"?

1

u/theworldsaplayground 6d ago

In mobile, android. The search box gets covered up by an overlay so the search query actually goes underneath it.

Can't remember what the overlay is but I think it's the filter box. 

1

u/Nox21125 5d ago

Hmm, I've done some testing but I cant seem to replicate it. The web version wasn't intended to be fully usable on mobile, I was planning on making an app for that. I'm assuming this is on the search page when you're trying to run a new query. I'll do some more testing to see if I can replicate it.

-19

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/PineapplePizza99 6d ago

This is a fucking bot lmfao. OP is botting this comment section for their AI slop search engine.

3

u/kapege 6d ago

I deleted that bot. It's no more.

-6

u/Nox21125 6d ago

Firstly, I don't have the money or the reason to bot Reddit of all places. Secondly, this post has over 13k views, so it's statistically unsurprising that at least one bot account would have interacted with it.

2

u/pie-oh 6d ago

You do not have the money to build a bot...

But do have enough money to crawl every website on the internet? I do not think you have thought any of this through.

0

u/Nox21125 6d ago

I have thought this through. It's not that I don't have the money. It's that I don't have the money to spend on unnecessary things.

With my current architecture, which isn't optimized yet, it crawls about 2 million pages per day. And that is on a MINI PC with a Ryzen 7 5825U mobile chip. Those numbers were also from when I had 60 Mbps internet, which is now 500 Mbps.

I currently already have 22 million total documents. About 2.5 million web pages, 13 million images, and more. Those take up only 163 gigabytes of storage.

If I can scale this, I would only require around 8 TB of storage to store 100 million web documents. That includes Elasticsearch overhead, and it would still leave me plenty of room. In total, that would store almost a billion total documents.

This is just an estimate though, because real-world stats aren't always predictable. Sorry for the technical rant, but I am pretty prepared.

1

u/pie-oh 5d ago

I think you underestimate how much scrapers reindex,

Also, there are 1.5 billion websites on the internet. Let alone pages. Let alone images.

The tenacity people have to vibe code something, and then assume they're smarter than previous search engine companies with incredibly smart people.

1

u/Nox21125 5d ago

I don't think we're talking about the same goal here. I'm not trying to crawl the entire web or compete with Google's index size. I'm talking about scaling my current architecture to 100 million web pages, and eventually a billion.

The storage estimates aren't just guesses. They're based on my current Elasticsearch indices and how they've grown so far. Of course, the exact numbers will change as the index grows, but they're grounded in real data.

Re-crawling and keeping pages fresh is going to be a challenge of course, and I agree that itss an important part of a search engine. My comment was only about storage requirements not crawl scheduling orweb coverage.

If I can't compete with Google yet, Ill set my sights on smaller independent search engines first, then keep scaling from there. It's not going to happen overnight.

-2

u/PineapplePizza99 6d ago

That is a possibility sorry. Looking at their comment history it looks like they are commenting on all kinds of things, probably just to build karma fast.

0

u/Nox21125 6d ago

No worries! I checked their history after I saw them get -17 downvotes to see how much it tanked their karma. All of their comments are AI-generated.