We’re (a group of friends) building a search engine from scratch to compete with DuckDuckGo. It still needs a name and logo.
Here’s some pictures (results not cherrypicked): https://imgur.com/a/eVeQKWB
Unique traits:
- Written in pure Rust backend, HTML and CSS only on frontend - no JavaScript, PHP, SQL, etc…
- Has a custom database, schema, engine, indexer, parser, and spider
- Extensively themeable with CSS - theme submissions welcome
- Only two crates used - TOML and Rocket (plus Rust’s standard library)
- Homegrown index - not based on Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, or anything else
- Pages are statically generated - super fast load times
- If an onion link is available, an “Onion” button appears to the left of the clearnet URL
- Easy to audit - No: JavaScript, WASM, etc… requests can be audited with F12 network tab
- Works over Tor with strictest settings (official Tor hidden service address at the bottom of this post)
- Allows for modifiers: hacker -news +youtube removes all results containing hacker news and only includes results that contain the word “youtube”
- Optional tracker removal from results - on by default h No censorship - results are what they are (exception: underage material)
- No ads in results - if we do ever have ads, they’ll be purely text in the bottom right corner, away from results, no media
- Everything runs in memory, no user queries saved.
- Would make Richard Stallman smile :)
THIS IS A PRE-ALPHA PRODUCT, it will get much MUCH better over the coming months. The dataset in the temporary hidden service linked below does not do our algorithm justice, its there to prove our concept. Please don’t judge the technology until beta.
Onion URL (hosted on my laptop since so many people asked for the link): ht6wt7cs7nbzn53tpcnliig6zrqyfuimoght2pkuyafz5lognv4uvmqd.onion
For anyone who asks, we will not open source, but we may offer a licensed self-hosted version for a small yearly fee (maybe $10-20).
I’ve open sourced everything I’ve made in the past, and all that’s happened is someone with more money picks up my project, outcompetes me, and drives me out of business. I dont want our hard work going to waste.
Isn’t that literally what the GPL3 exists to prevent? So called “tivoization”?
You know what would really make stallman smile is if you licensed it under something that requires sharing the source and all modifications.
Also solves the cost problem since you no longer have to support the infrastructure for all users just a small subset. I already host searxng and it’s not great but I host it because I support projects that encourage self hosting and we need more free and open source search options
Also how is your product getting used by another company “going to waste” all your work? Maybe you mean take advantage of without paying? But if that’s the case and money is such a big deal how is advertising off the table? Unless you’re trying to compete with kagi, but you’re facing a huge uphill struggle if you plan to monitize and not be open source/self hostable…
If on the other hand you change your mind about it, I’ll be one of many self hosting fans who will happily deploy and contribute to improve the project in any way possible. (Currently self hosting searxng here)
That said, even if it’s not fully open, really looking forward to seeing the project grow, it sounds like you have your hearts in the right place and we sure do need something better.
the goal is to prevent competition, not promote it.
pick one.
Our frontend is open, its just HTML and CSS, nothing proprietary client side, which would piss him off.
He’d be pissed off about the BE being proprietary.
Actually, kind of not. FSF has a weird blindspot when it comes to backend stuff. They care about what runs on your computer, e.g. Javascript, but stuff running on a server that you don’t own they don’t really care about. The AGPL had to come from an outside third party, not the FSF themselves. The FSF has been pretty silent when it comes to making licenses to regulate the whole “cloud” space.
It’s one of the big reason why the FSF has been slowly driving away into irrelevancy. The modern computing world is all about servers and data flowing between them. And the FSF is continuing doing licensing like it’s the 1980s. They are so far behind that politics got there first with the GDPR. There is still no “GNU GDPR” that you can slap on your software to give people outside Europe similar rights.
It would be a little more work, but you could make your front-end separate and open source, just so people could see you aren’t tracking them while still keeping your indexing, web crawling, ranking, and database, I.e the real hard stuff closed source. I don’t care much, but with the crowd you’re appealing to it might help get more customers.
The frontend is pure HTML and CSS, you can see what its doing with inspect element, all network requests too