Building Clew

behind the scenes of independent search

Now, more than ever, people are giving up on mainstream search engines and looking for alternatives. Most alternatives, though, have a simple problem: they still rely on the mainstream indexes.

I wanted a search engine that:

  1. relies on an independent index
  2. is self-hostable
  3. focuses on personal websites

And so, I made Clew. While I’ve come a long way, there’s still a ton of work to be done, and on this blog I’m going to share that journey with you.

Recent Updates

  1. redesigning the index

    I believe I’ve reached a point in Clew’s development where, armed with the knowledge I’ve acquired from months of crawling sites and using that data to search the index, it’s time to wipe the index...

    blog.clew.se/posts/index-redesign/
  2. I'm Losing Faith in BM25

    The current way that result ranking works in Clew is very different from what I want.

    blog.clew.se/posts/im-losing-faith-in-bm25/
  3. Welcome to the Madness

    In which we launch the insanity that is this development blog for Clew.

    blog.clew.se/posts/welcome-to-the-madness/