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

  • Gravitywell@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.