It all started with a dream. Not a metaphorical one, but a literal, vivid dream about the early, wild west days of the internet. I woke up with a mission: to build a search engine that could rediscover the forgotten, personal webpages of that era. That dream, however, collided with the reality of the modern web.
What began as a nostalgic quest to revive the quirky, hand-coded corners of the internet evolved into something far more ambitious. I’m Ryan Pearce, and I’m the solo developer behind Searcha Co. From my home in Roseville, California, I’ve single-handedly built an independent, AI-enhanced search engine that now powers two public search sites: Seek Ninja and Searcha Page. And I did it all without a dollar of VC funding.
This is the story of how a one-person startup, armed with a shoestring budget and a lot of late nights, is taking on the giants of search.
The Underdog Ethos: Building a Search Engine from Scratch
After years in the corporate tech scene in Austin, I moved back to my hometown of Roseville, seeking a quieter life closer to family and the Sierra Nevada mountains. But the itch to build remained. The initial dream of a “nostalgia” search engine quickly ran into the harsh realities of the modern web – a landscape dominated by SEO spam and auto-generated content.
So, I pivoted. The new goal was to create a truly independent search engine, free from the influence of Big Tech APIs. This meant building everything from the ground up: the web crawler, the index, the ranking algorithms, and the user interface.
The Laundry Room Data Center
My initial setup was humble: a second-hand EPYC 7532 workstation with 512 GB of RAM and 40 TB of SSD storage, running out of my bedroom. The constant heat and fan noise quickly became unsustainable. The solution? I rerouted the entire system into my laundry closet, mounting the servers on wall shelves behind the door. It’s a testament to the “whatever it takes” mentality of a boot-strapped founder.
This “laundry room data center,” assembled with about $4,000 worth of hardware, now powers a search index of over two billion pages and can handle an estimated 50,000 searches a day.
A Tale of Two Search Sites: Privacy vs. Personalization
From this homegrown infrastructure, two distinct search experiences emerged, each with a different philosophy on privacy:
- Seek Ninja: This is for the privacy purists. It operates in a strict, stateless mode with no cookies, no user IDs, and no search history. It’s designed for maximum anonymity.
- Searcha Page: This site offers a more personalized experience. It uses a long-lived, browser-stored session to improve the relevance of search results over time. It’s important to note that this is not tied to a personal account or IP address and does not profile users across the web.
This dual approach allows users to choose the level of privacy that they’re comfortable with, a choice rarely offered by the dominant players in the search market.
The Power of AI in a One-Person Startup
Building a search engine solo would have been nearly impossible just a few years ago. Modern machine learning and AI-assisted development tools have leveled the playing field. I’ve leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) for everything from query understanding and context linkage to ranking results.
But AI is not a silver bullet. My approach is a hybrid one, blending the power of AI with traditional search ranking methods to avoid hallucinations and ensure the results are reliable. In many real-world tests, the quality of the results is highly competitive with Google.
Beyond the search pipeline itself, I used AI to build my own internal software stack. This includes a custom-built task manager, CRM, analytics platform, and more. This “personal SaaS” has allowed me to operate as a solo founder without relying on expensive off-the-shelf software.
The Journey Ahead: A Call for Beta Testers
The launch of Seek Ninja and Searcha Page is just the beginning. I’m proud to be building this project in my hometown of Roseville and have long-term goals of generating enough revenue to work on this full-time, hire local talent, and eventually build a headquarters here.
Both search sites are currently in open beta, and I’m actively seeking feedback from the community. I invite you to try them out and let me know what you think. Building an alternative to Big Tech is a monumental task, but it’s a challenge I’m passionate about.
In a world where a handful of tech giants control so much of our online experience, creating a viable, independent alternative feels like a victory in itself. This is more than just a search engine; it’s a statement that with determination and the right tools, a single person can still make a dent in the universe.
