21CTO

Aug 15, 2026 · Backend Development

How One Developer Built a $10, 1 GB Search Engine to Rival Google

Alex Morley‑Finch created the open‑source Marlin search engine using a $10 cloud GPU and under 1 GB of storage, crawling 560,000 homepages, employing a lightweight LLM for categorisation, and revealing challenges with noisy tags and scalability while showing a weekend‑sized, low‑cost alternative to mainstream search.