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
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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I don’t know DuckDuckGo, but what’s the purpose of trying to compete with it? This is not a rhetorical question. Is there something wrong with DuckDuckGo, something you feel you can do better, or are you just making a competitor for the principle?
Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don’t seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We’ve also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives… Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.
Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn’t ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.
That is wrong. Yes there are licensing the bing search database but it is not the only one they use. They have their own crawler too.
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