I am looking for an alternative to blast that can search the UniProt sequence database in a faster way by losing some sensitivity. I am interesting in finding only relatively close homolog sequences, say >~ 50% sequence identity. Thus, sensitivity is not an issue. I thought it could be possible to do that with blast by tuning some parameters like word length and so on but I haven't gotten anywhere. I've come across USEARCH that claims better performance but could not try it out since one needs a license for it.
Any ideas around?