I Built a 500k-Domain Search Engine for Makers in a Weekend for $10

A developer built a personal search engine indexing over 560,000 homepages in a weekend for approximately $10 using a rented GPU and a local language model, designed to surface independent creators and niche projects while filtering out corporate SEO spam. The system uses a simple crawler to fetch homepages, a small AI model to summarize and categorize each site, and stores all metadata in under a gigabyte on disk. The project demonstrates that building a functional search index is feasible for personal use without major infrastructure, though the creator explicitly avoided scaling features like multi-tenancy or continuous recrawling.