marlin Sunday, 2am. I couldn’t sleep and I was annoyed at search engines again. Every query I actually cared about, portfolios, zines, weird little art projects, one-person software, drowned under a foot of corporate documentation and SEO sludge. So I did the thing you do at 2am: I opened a terminal and typed out a plan. “I want to make a search engine for myself only. There are 40-ish million domains. We can store a bit of metadata about each one. Even with 1KB each that’s 40GB, which is doable.” By Wednesday lunch I had 560,183 homepages catalogued, an empty queue of anything worth fetching next, and a decision to stop. This is the story of that weekend: what I built, what broke, what it cost, and what I’d tell you if you wanted to build your own. The headline, if you only read one paragraph: for about $10, an overnight GPU rental, and a few hours of steering the thing while it ran, you can have a personal search index of a few hundred thousand sites, under a gigabyte on disk. That’s the whole pitch.…