Isn't this more likely to have been inspired by marginalia* than a personal blogs thread? Doesn't seem to have the same results from the Apple Watch example, but it's what immediately came to mind for me when I read this post's title.
Vlad was dabbling with similar things to Marginalia with Teclis around the same time Marginalia first made headlines.
And to be fair, I was simultaneously inspired by the blog thread to build a curated blog filter for my search engine, which led to a series of changes that overall tends to promote more of this types of results in general.
The fact that we're several to have similar ideas sort of validates the ideas I think.
I'm not complaining, glad there's more tools for searching outside the scope of SEO spam or content mills, and competition can only make the niche better (presumably, unless it gets big enough to incentivize disguising commercial content as niche blogs). Just felt like it might be a bit disingenuous to quote a blog list as inspiration for a search engine focused on "the non-commercial part of the web" which is exactly your engine's aim and wording, didn't know they've been working on small web initiatives since a similar timeline.
Hopefully you both find success and with it uplift hobbyist websites.
*https://search.marginalia.nu, commonly mentioned on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?query=marginalia