Developer Builds Independent Search Engine, Reveals Hidden Complexity of the Web

A developer building Slick, an independent search engine focused on privacy and customization, has shared insights into the challenges of creating a functional search system from scratch. Before ranking or AI can play any role, a crawler must first discover, fetch, process, and deduplicate web pages — a task complicated by dynamic content, disappearing pages, and bot-blocking servers. Keyword matching algorithms like BM25 remain useful, but they fall short when it comes to understanding user intent, requiring search systems to combine multiple signals including semantic search and document quality scoring. The developer also challenges the notion that AI will replace search, arguing that AI models still depend on reliable information retrieval and cannot independently verify whether a source is accurate or outdated. The project highlights how ranking quality, not sheer document volume, determines whether a search engine is genuinely useful.