I Built a 500k-Domain Search Engine for Makers in a Weekend for $10
Summary
A solo developer documents building a personal search engine that catalogs about 560k homepages over a weekend for around $10 in GPU time. The project focuses on per-domain metadata rather than full-page text, uses a small local model to generate summaries and tags, and emphasizes cost, scalability decisions, and practical edge cases (like Tumblr/Neocities bias and empty pages). The article also notes scaling challenges and provides open-source repo references for anyone wanting to replicate a similar weekend project.