Google Site Search, which can be used to power the search for websites has started showing Ads (miserably even competitors ads). Here is an alternative, where you can get complete control on your search UI as well as the Ranking algorithm. You can build a demo for your website in 5minutes (there is a free 15day trial) and give me your feedback. I am looking to learn where should our focus be. Is it more on the frontend design (Search UI control) or on the backend algorighmic control(ranking, boosts, filters).

I will be happy to offer 6months free for your feedback. Thanks HN community.

> Google Site Search, which can be used to power the search for websites has started showing Ads (miserably even competitors ads).

Indeed. It is unbelievably bad! I was recently trying to integrate Google Site Search into https://share.cocalc.com/, and on many test queries I would see an entire page of ads for our competitors (or completely irrelevant) products. E.g., if I searched for "julia" (thinking of the programming language), I would get a full page of ads for jewelry! I ended up just building a little search box from scratch myself that pops up another browser tab with a normal Google search that has "site:share.cocalc.com" pre-pended to it. This seems to work surprisingly well -- there can be ads (it's just a normal google search), but they are at least completely blocked if you have an adblocker installed. What is the drawback of this approach of just using site: rather than Google site search or expertrec.com?

Expertrec - since it is built specifically to be used by site owners, will give you complete control on your ranking and crawling (which you can try contacting google support for a response). I wont complain about google search, (I was part of it and had worked hard to improve it), but remember you dont have any control when your new page or your modification will be re-indexed by google. you cant fix a broken result if something obviously bad shows up.

You have a clever hack, and I appreciate your ingenuity. You have got rid of the Ads, but still have the handicap of not having full control on your search. Why not use this time to leapfrog? It is just 9$

Can you share more details about searching LinkedIn via your solution?

We have a variant of Expertrec for that. you can read more here.

https://blog.expertrec.com/how-to-create-an-unlimited-ad-fre...

We are planning to go with shared indexes for these large websites to keep the cost low, so no control on ranking.

I use Algolia as a search provider. It’s fast, and free for me(because my need is really small, and fits their free plan). How does this compare to Algolia?

Expertrec is an end to end solution for site owners, so you go live with a single JS inclusion and pretty much everything else is optional. As a bootstrapped startup, we cant afford to have any free plans, but at 9$ it is totally unbranded experience. Aravindh, you should certainly try our solution (at least the demo that is automatically built for you) and share your feedback.

Ecosia.com, if you want to save the world. ;)

Expertrec is not a Google Alternative and no where closer to saving the world like ecosia, but it helps site owners to save their users from forced ads by providing an alternative to google site search.