u/Nox21125

I've been thinking about customizability in search engines lately. Google has good results but is full of ads and tracking. Other engines like Startpage are private but have minimal customization options. Kagi is probably the only commercial search engine that has lots of customization features, "giving users control".

I'm curious how much people actually care about customizability in one. Customizability such as tweaking filters, shortcuts, result layouts, custom ranking, etc.

For me it's pretty high, maybe an 9 out of 10. Good results, speed, and privacy come first of course, but if I don't like a feature and can't remove it (cough... AI overviews) then its a dealbreaker for me.

How much do you care? 1-10 and why? What tweaks would make you switch? Ever left one because it was too locked down?

Appreciate any thoughts.

I've been thinking about customizability in search engines lately. Google has good results but is full of ads and tracking. Other engines like Startpage are private but have minimal customization options. Kagi is probably the only commercial search engine that has lots of customization features, "giving users control".

I'm curious how much people actually care about customizability in one. Customizability such as tweaking filters, shortcuts, result layouts, custom ranking, etc.

For me it's pretty high, maybe an 9 out of 10. Good results, speed, and privacy come first of course, but if I don't like a feature and can't remove it (cough... AI overviews) then its a dealbreaker for me.

How much do you care? 1-10 and why? What tweaks would make you switch? Ever left one because it was too locked down?

Appreciate any thoughts.

Custom bang manager in Slick. Accessible through the settings button in the top right corner of the homepage.

One of my favorite features from DuckDuckGo has always been !Bangs. The only issue I had with them though was customizability. DuckDuckGo doesn’t really have an easy built-in way to add your own bangs.

I tried finding workarounds using browser keyword shortcuts and other tools/sites, but all of it felt too tedious or slower than it should be.

So while working on my search engine project, Slick, I ended up building a custom bang system directly into it.

Since the bang mappings are resolved locally instead of being fetched from a server, they’re noticeably faster than regular bang redirects. Even the normal bangs that aren't local feel slightly faster than DuckDuckGo’s.

So even if my search engine doesn’t always bring up the best results, the bangs kind of make up for it.

I also wrote a short blog post explaining how the system works: https://blog.slicksearchhq.com/post/custom-bangs-and-custom-ranking-in-slick

Slick: https://slicksearchhq.com/

Custom bang manager in Slick. Accessible through the settings button in the top right corner of the homepage.

DuckDuckGo Bangs are a really useful feature that comes with DuckDuckGo's search engine. One issue I always had with them though was customizability. DuckDuckGo doesn't really have an easy way to add your own bangs.

I tried finding workarounds using other sites or even just built in browser keyword shortcuts, but all of that felt too tedious or slow.

So while working on my search engine project, Slick, I ended up building a custom bang system into it.

Since the bang mappings are resolved locally instead of being fetched from a server, they are noticeably faster than regular bang redirects. Even the regular bangs are slightly faster than DuckDuckGo's.

So even if my search engine doesn't always bring up the best results, the bangs kind of make up for it.

I also wrote a short blog post explaining how the system works:
https://blog.slicksearchhq.com/post/custom-bangs-and-custom-ranking-in-slick

Slick:
https://slicksearchhq.com/

oh and !d is for duckduckgo btw.

I published a ranking progress update for Slick, the private search engine I’ve been working on.

One thing that became obvious while building ranking is how different query types fail in completely different ways.

Navigational queries usually fail because the engine understands the topic, but picks the wrong page on the right domain.

Definitional queries fail because token overlap can overpower actual intent.

Broad explainer queries fail because multiple pages look semantically correct even when they are answering slightly different questions.

The ranking system started as a single-stage score, then moved toward hybrid retrieval + reranking. Current ranking uses lexical and dense recall with fusion, followed by cross-encoder reranking and heuristic blending.

Some examples from the benchmark suite:

• apple now consistently returns the homepage instead of product/search pages
• stackoverflow no longer ranks dataset mirrors above the official site
• what is artificial intelligence shifted away from biography-style matches toward direct explanations

There are still obvious weak spots:

• locale/subdomain selection (facebook, twitter)
• semantic drift on explainer queries
• weak local search without geo/user signals
• comparison queries like react vs vue

I also published frozen benchmark dumps and ranking comparisons across versions instead of only showing final results.

Full write-up:
https://blog.slicksearchhq.com/post/slick-ranking-progress-update-fri-may-15-2026

Benchmark repo:
https://github.com/SlickSearch/Slick-Statistics

I thought the hardest part of building a search engine would be ranking.

After working on one, I think crawling is actually harder.

Ranking only works if your data is good. When you start crawling, a lot of what you find is low-quality or repetitive. If that ends up in your index, ranking does not really fix the problem.

So crawling becomes less about "collect pages" and more about decisions like:

• what to include
• what to ignore
• what to prioritize

For a smaller search engine, this matters even more because you don't have the luxury of indexing everything and sorting it later.

Curious how other people think about this: crawling or ranking?

Full write-up: https://blog.slicksearchhq.com/post/the-hardest-part-of-search-isnt-ranking-its-crawling