search on the web got worse, so i wrote my own

opinions · Feb 10, 2026 · 1 min read

i used search to find things. now i use search to be mildly annoyed.

the problems are not new, they just got better funded:

• answer containers that answer a different question than the one you typed
• ai summaries that are confident and wrong, which is the worst possible combination
• a wall of sponsored results before the actual results
• ten pages of the same article, scraped and rehosted

so i built search into this site. it is a small text index over my own posts, projects and pages. it is worse than a real search engine and better in one specific way: it only ever returns things i wrote.

i am not claiming to have solved search. i am claiming that the useful part of search is a good index and honest results, and that a surprising amount of the rest is someone trying to sell you something.

the whole thing is a few hundred lines. the hard part was not the matching, it was deciding what deserved to be in the index at all.