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#70 of 100 · Search
Better than Google Scholar
A better paper and book search that finds free full texts, searches inside books and shows what each work cites.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay17%
- Want it local or private0%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted0%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 12 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for1 Show HN launches do this job, and 8 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
Instead of: Google Scholar, Amazon, arXiv
The idea, as matched
A search and discovery service for academic papers and books, with full-text search inside books, free versions of papers, references between works, and trend tracking, better than Google Scholar.
Jev first matched 17 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 12 of 17.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Books and papers split about evenly.
- Dec 2024Would pay for literature-review search favoring recent papers, grey literature and open-access coverage, for R&D tax work. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers”
- May 2024Wants a canonical searchable site of free papers instead of paywalled links. Read it: a comment in “Storing knowledge in a single long plain text file”
- Nov 2023Would pay for a service that surfaces interesting computer science and math papers. Read it: a comment in “The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications”
- Sep 2023Wants a better way to search the content of published books. Read it: a comment in “Universities have disinvested from their presses just as much as their libraries”
- Jul 2022Wants a search engine for textbooks by topic, like listing astrodynamics books. Read it: a comment in “Astrodynamics Textbooks on My Shelf”
- Jan 2021Wants an aggregator for new software engineering books that filters out beginner-oriented titles. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there an aggregator for new software engineering books?”
- Sep 2019Wants an n-gram trend viewer for Google Scholar literature. Read it: a comment in “Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed?”
- Aug 2018Wants a way to list the books referenced in a given book's bibliography and explore onward. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there a website that lists bibliographies of books?”
- Jun 2018Wants a search engine that surfaces free shadow-library results instead of publisher sites. Read it: a comment in “Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results”
- Jan 2018Asks for a tool to find relevant papers for a topic. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: HyperLogLog intersections”
- Aug 2009Wants a better scientific paper search than Google Scholar, which returns noisy, loosely related results. Read it: a post: “Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles”
- Dec 2008Wants a PDF search tool to locate a specific paper they cannot find. Read it: a comment in “Raising the World’s I.Q. with Micronutrients”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.