Hey HN! I've been hacking on a project and figured I'd share it with the community. CrowdView is a search engine for discussion sites (forums, message boards, Discord, and Twitter for now).

Like many of you, I find Google results to be full of SEO spam and have resorted to adding "site:reddit.com" or "site:news.ycombinator.com" to all my queries (since 2015!). Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out "what does a genuine, real life human think about this thing?".

But limiting my results to just Reddit isn't ideal because so much great content exists elsewhere. Lots of great information and conversations have moved to Discord, and niche forums are still alive on the web! But it's impossible to find these places because they rank so poorly on Google. So I built a search engine across a curated list of these (there's about 3000+ forums, message boards, and discords so far), making sure to remove any kind of SEO junk (blog spam, listicles, etc).

Please try it out and share any feedback! (and bear with it, the results can be slow at times)