Posts / The Story of Scira (Formerly MiniPerplx) - Inception

A project that may have made Perplexity AI run for its money(?)

Let's start what Scira is first; Scira is a minimalistic AI search engine built in search of simplicity and minimalism.

How it all started

Last year, in August 2024, I wasn't doing much stuff. I was just sitting thinking what should i been do next, since for last 2 months doing random things mostly experimenting with the Vercel AI SDK, but this time i wanted to do something solid, something that would make an lasting impact.

Then my dad came in and said, "Why aren't you doing anything? You should be doing something with your skills. You are wasting them doing nothing.".

So I went to x.com to find what people are doing, and I saw a post from Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas. So I thought that i could do something similar but better that this.

My thoughts on Perplexity AI: being an AI search engine and give it premium features in its Pro plan doesn't make any sense as most of them are very basic and could be better.

So I started working on MiniPerplx(now Scira), a minimalistic AI search engine that would be simple and easy to use. I started working on it on August 4th, 2024 and made a post on X about it on August 6th.

On 7th August, I officially announced MiniPerplx on X and it went viral! 14k impressions is a lot for me to be honest.

How the Vercel AI SDK helped and inspired me to build MiniPerplx

I was looking for a way to build an AI search engine which was not just easy to integrate but to understand as well. As i mentioned I had been experimenting with the Vercel AI SDK for a while and used to post about it on X.

The Vercel AI SDK was a great way to build with Generative AI and I thought why not build an AI search engine with it. So I started working on MiniPerplx with the Vercel AI SDK and the best way thing about it was that it

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Scira get's 1k+ visitors daily and is growing rapidly. The github repo has 4000+ stars and 450+ forks.