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Top 19 C++ Search Projects
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C-Plus-Plus
Collection of various algorithms in mathematics, machine learning, computer science and physics implemented in C++ for educational purposes.
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Typesense
Open Source alternative to Algolia + Pinecone and an Easier-to-Use alternative to ElasticSearch ⚡ 🔍 ✨ Fast, typo tolerant, in-memory fuzzy Search Engine for building delightful search experiences
Project mention: I Built a $0 Search Engine on Real Web Data (No Algolia or Elasticsearch) | dev.to | 2026-04-20Index them with Typesense (a FOSS, lightning-fast, local-first Algolia alternative)
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manticoresearch
Easy to use open source fast database for search | Good alternative to Elasticsearch | Drop-in replacement for E in the ELK stack
Search Engine: Manticore Search (running in Docker). We chose Manticore for its lightweight footprint and powerful full-text search capabilities, essential for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).
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USearch
Fast Open-Source Search & Clustering engine × for Vectors & Arbitrary Objects × in C++, C, Python, JavaScript, Rust, Java, Objective-C, Swift, C#, GoLang, and Wolfram 🔍
Depending on how 'one-off' the query is, sequential read is the right answer. The alternative is indexing the data for ANN, which will generally require doing the equivalent of many queries across the dataset.
On the bright side, smart folks have already thought pretty hard about this. In my work, I ended up picking usearch for large-scale vector storage and ANN search. It's plenty fast and is happy working with vectors on disk - solutions which are /purely/ concerned with latency often don't include support for vectors on disk, which forces you into using a hell of a lot of RAM.
https://github.com/unum-cloud/USearch
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ugrep
🔍 ugrep 7.8 file pattern searcher -- a user-friendly, faster, more capable grep replacement. Includes a TUI, Google-like Boolean search with AND/OR/NOT, fuzzy search, hexdumps, searches (nested) archives (zip, 7z, tar, pax, cpio), compressed files (gz, Z, bz2, lzma, xz, lz4, zstd, brotli), pdfs, docs, and more
Project mention: Is Grep All You Need? How Agent Harnesses Reshape Agentic Search | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-09If performance is the concern, ugrep will get you most of the way there relative to gnu grep, and should be fully grep compatible in terms of syntax:
https://github.com/Genivia/ugrep#aliases
Claude Code may ship with ugrep already.
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rats-search
rats-search: BitTorrent P2P multi-platform search engine for Desktop and Web servers with integrated torrent client
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clp
Compressed Log Processor (CLP) is a free log management tool capable of compressing logs and searching the compressed logs without decompression.
Project mention: CLP: Compress Your Logs. Search Without Decompression | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-01 -
Project mention: Show HN: Seltz – The fastest, high quality, search API for AI agents | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-20
More on latency and search:
We benchmark against 10 other search APIs on fresh news queries. The median was around 1.2s; we came in around 166ms and scored highest on answer accuracy (89% vs 84% for the next cluster).
Latency matters because agents loop. A 1.2s first call eats the budget for follow-ups — you get one shot at framing the query. At sub-250ms the agent can actually search, read, reformulate, and search again.
Measuring this stuff carefully is something I've been at for a while. My ECIR 2019 paper (linked below) was an exhaustive study of 11 index compression methods across 5 query processing algorithms on standard collections — the codebase became PISA, which a lot of IR folks still use for research. Almost ten years later, the workload has changed completely (agents, not humans), but the benchmarking discipline is the same.
ECIR 2019 paper: https://www.antoniomallia.it/uploads/ECIR19c.pdf
Pisa Engine: https://github.com/pisa-engine/pisa
Full methodology and charts for Seltz: https://seltz.ai/blog/why-we-built-seltz
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UStore
Multi-Modal Database replacing MongoDB, Neo4J, and Elastic with 1 faster ACID solution, with NetworkX and Pandas interfaces, and bindings for C 99, C++ 17, Python 3, Java, GoLang 🗄️
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fccf
fccf: A command-line tool that quickly searches through C/C++ source code in a directory based on a search string and prints relevant code snippets that match the query.
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Project mention: MetaGraph: Scalable annotated de Bruijn graphs for DNA indexing and alignment | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-10-09
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Katalog
Katalog is an application to manage catalogs of disks and files to search and get statistics.
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Spectacle
Spectacle is the first global search for Unreal Engine 4 specifiers. Check out the finished product at https://unrealistic.dev/spectacle. (by UnrealisticDev)
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ Search discussion
C++ Search related posts
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I Built a $0 Search Engine on Real Web Data (No Algolia or Elasticsearch)
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Show HN: Seltz – The fastest, high quality, search API for AI agents
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Querying 3B Vectors
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Building a Sovereign AI Stack: From Zero to POC
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CLP: Compress Your Logs. Search Without Decompression
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Ask HN: At 34, can I aspire to being more than a JavaScript widget engineer?
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Zig / C++ Interop
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 15 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Search projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | C-Plus-Plus | 34,354 |
| 2 | Typesense | 25,974 |
| 3 | manticoresearch | 11,819 |
| 4 | USearch | 4,153 |
| 5 | ugrep | 3,173 |
| 6 | rats-search | 1,877 |
| 7 | clp | 1,066 |
| 8 | pisa | 1,050 |
| 9 | UStore | 632 |
| 10 | VanitySearch | 574 |
| 11 | fccf | 384 |
| 12 | grab | 263 |
| 13 | hypergrep | 244 |
| 14 | metagraph | 230 |
| 15 | ds2i | 150 |
| 16 | Katalog | 142 |
| 17 | looqs | 21 |
| 18 | Spectacle | 16 |
| 19 | rummage | 5 |
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