HawkSearch is the incumbent in distribution: pre-integrated into the B2B commerce platforms, sold through the agencies that build your storefront. Dartfind is the same job done differently — a catalog search engine you install on your own server and own outright, for one payment, with no subscription behind it.
Built for distributors and wholesalers with large, messy catalogs — from 10,000 to 100 million records.
Annual licence, annual renewal, annual increase. Stop paying and the search box stops working. After five years of fees you own nothing — and the catalog you indexed is still theirs to host.
It arrives pre-integrated in the commerce platform or bundled by the agency building your site. That's a fine way to buy software. It is not the same as having compared it against anything.
Synonym lists, boost rules, redirects, curated results. The platform is capable, but the relevance is only as good as the rules someone maintains — and that maintenance is a permanent job.
In July 2026 we ran the same three queries against the on-site search of twenty North American electrical and electronics distributors — a plain-language product description, a category term, and one deliberate misspelling of a common part. We logged what came back.
This is not a claim about any one vendor's capability. It is what those deployments do today, and it is thirty seconds to reproduce on your own storefront. Type a part number wrong. Watch what a customer sees.
| Dartfind | HawkSearch | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | One-time license, owned outright | Annual subscription, renewed and repriced every year |
| Hosting | Your server, on-premise or your cloud | Their cloud |
| Data location | Never leaves your network, works offline | Catalog indexed on vendor infrastructure |
| Broken input | Native — typos, partial SKUs, glued words, no rules to write | Handled through configuration; depends on the rules maintained |
| Relevance upkeep | Matching math, not a synonym list to feed | Synonyms, boosts and curated rules, maintained continuously |
| Merchandising console | Ranking controls and an API; a console is custom work | Mature merchandising and personalization UI |
| Platform connectors | Sits behind an API — integrated, not pre-installed | Pre-built connectors across many B2B platforms |
| Long-term cost | Fixed. Price never grows with catalog or traffic | Recurring, for as long as you want search to work |
Two rows go to HawkSearch. That is the honest shape of it — they have the console and the connectors, and if those are what you're buying, buy them.
A query typed the way a contractor at a counter actually types it — and the result list it lands on.
A comparison table where one column wins every row is an ad. Three cases where we’d tell you to stay put:
If your catalog is large, your customers type badly, and the renewal comes back higher every year — that's the profile where a one-time license wins the math in the first year and everything after is savings.
A sync script feeds your catalog into the engine — from a database or a plain export — and keeps it updated on schedule. A query endpoint answers searches; your storefront calls it instead of HawkSearch. It sits behind an API rather than inside the platform, so it works alongside Optimizely B2B, Znode, Adobe Commerce, SAP Commerce, Oro, BigCommerce or a fully custom build. For most stacks this is days of work — and the free pilot skips integration entirely.
Those are numbers from a live deployment: an auto-parts retailer runs Dartfind as its counter and catalog search, fed with broken part numbers every day. The engine is built for catalogs up to 100 million records on an ordinary x86 server. Full case on the main page.
Send a catalog export — real or fake. Two days later you have a working search box in your infrastructure, next to your current HawkSearch setup. Type your customers’ worst queries at both. Then decide.