Antfly
Ranked 19 of 38 search engines by recommenders
People recommend it as a distributed database combining full-text, semantic and graph search in one single-binary deployment. Critics say the project is not openly licensed.
People recommend it as a distributed database combining full-text, semantic and graph search in one single-binary deployment. Critics say the project is not openly licensed.
16 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 94%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 15 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Full-text, semantic and graph search
“Antfly can create full-text, semantic, and graph indexes natively, so scaffolding a personal knowledge graph is quite straightforward”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “A search-and-inference database from scratch in pure Zig” “the JSON query DSL allows you to pipeline, join, fuse all the full-text, semantic, graph, reranking, pruning”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go” “All tradition full text search capabilities are supported! Fuzzy matching, regexp, etc.”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go” Knowledge base and memory use cases
“Antfly can create full-text, semantic, and graph indexes natively, so scaffolding a personal knowledge graph is quite straightforward”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “A search-and-inference database from scratch in pure Zig” “It's a fun use case that seemed to sit nicely at an intersection of what antfly does well.”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “A search-and-inference database from scratch in pure Zig” “A system like Antfly could be game-changing for creating a 'memory' of the content”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go” Single binary, no separate model server
“Packaging embedding and reranking inference alongside the database means no separate model server to manage”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go” “Single-binary deployment is a huge win for adoption”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Project not open source
“but the project isn't open”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go” “antfly is not open licensed”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “A search-and-inference database from scratch in pure Zig” Broken TypeScript SDK link
“I noticed that your TypeScript SDK link results in a 404”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go”
Other search engines people recommend
The four most recommended other search engines, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kagi | 732 | 234 | 76% | 13 | 2 yrs106 owners | Approved |
| Google Search | 315 | 1,039 | 23% | 12 | 20 yrs25 owners | — |
| DuckDuckGo | 286 | 204 | 58% | 12 | 3.5 yrs47 owners | — |
| Hister | 81 | 9 | 90% | 9 | 2 mo17 owners | Approved |
| AntflyThis page | 15 | 1 | 94% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
18 of the 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Antfly can create full-text, semantic, and graph indexes natively, so scaffolding a personal knowledge graph is quite straightforward”
“It's a fun use case that seemed to sit nicely at an intersection of what antfly does well.”
“the new Zig runtime is a huge improvement (better resource utilization, reliability, recovery, ...)”
“antfly is not open licensed”
“They’ve put a lot of effort into optimizing the local llm pipelines and I have a lot of faith in the devs working on it.”
“All tradition full text search capabilities are supported! Fuzzy matching, regexp, etc.”
“Single-binary deployment is a huge win for adoption”
“Packaging embedding and reranking inference alongside the database means no separate model server to manage”
“A system like Antfly could be game-changing for creating a 'memory' of the content”
“but the project isn't open”
“I'm also planning on using it at my current company.”
“this is the vector database I actually need”
“Was thinking to create something similar, well done!”
“that is a pretty sweet feature”
“I noticed that your TypeScript SDK link results in a 404”
“I agree with the goals set out for the project”
“one of my personal favorite features of antfly which is the linear merge api, which allows you to incrementally reconcile an external pageable datasource”
“the JSON query DSL allows you to pipeline, join, fuse all the full-text, semantic, graph, reranking, pruning”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.