Show HN: Search the IndieWeb, one query at a time (opens in new tab)

(search.indieblog.page)

1 pointssplitbrain6mo ago2 comments

The indie blog directory born from an idea here at Hackernews now also has it's own search engine. Unlike other engines it does not run crawlers, but simply indexes the blogs' RSS feeds.

2 comments

al_borland6mo ago

Nice work!

I re-caulked my bathroom tub yesterday and figured I’d search for “caulk”. Your search led me a blog with a nice post about a bunch of smaller tasks like this to help keep a home running well. While most searches for lists like this seem full of SEO and affiliate links, the result I got from your indie blog search just seems like a nice post, with a friendly tone, looking to share information they think would be helpful to others. It has links out to other resources, but as far as I can tell, they are just simple link to aid the reader.

I tried comparing this to Kagi’s small web filter, where the search returns 0 results. So it seems like you have the beginnings of something unique and useful here.

splitbrainOP6mo ago

A few years ago there was an Ask HN thread asking people here to show off their personal sites (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30934529). Reading that thread gave me the idea to build indieblog.page (previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002171). The list of blogs grew to nearly 5000 in the last years.

Alex Schroeder suggested to add a search engine on top of people's feeds as a way to search the Indieweb without adding even more crawlers to our collective infrastructure. I think it's a pretty cool way to quickly see what others have written on any given topic.