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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[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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Good to know you aren’t using SQL on the front end
Seems like you would be a direct competitor to kagi.com
Pointless talking about the code when the main challenges will be ops and infrastructure. What are you doing about those? Linking to an imgur hosted graphic isn’t a good look in that regard.
Index. Tell it like it is.
“Only two crates used”. What’s great about reinventing the wheel? A closed source project with big claims trying to reinvent everything from scratch. Nice project 🤣
Every dependency is a security hole
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Sounds interesting! I saw some other guy post about how you guys wouldn’t pick pro ukrainian content over pro russian and I think that’s the right thing to do. I always found it “interesting” that youtube will always promote the legacy media (in my eyes akin to propaganda) whenever you search for news or current events. Look forward to seeing where this goes and i hope you have an open policy about decisions in the search engine about what you promote vs demote. Who knows what else the other engines are promoting when people search to skew their views.
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.
source
Ahh, you’re the guys who posted over in reddit before your thread got locked that think it’s a good idea to promote Russian propaganda equally with Ukrainian content, because you don’t want to ‘Take sides’ politically. Closed source too, so that’s pretty much a dealbreaker right there, especially for Privacy focused users. We’ve been abused by closed source software for far too long to trust anything less.
You also have absolutely no plan on how to monetize, as others have said in this thread already.
I certainly won’t be supporting you, not with those values.
Thank you for taking the time to point this out.
Sounds great! Where do I fill in my sensitive data?
put the URLs below the titles and make the urls use a lighter color, like a shade of gray instead of black
If this is a closed source project, that statement doesn’t work even as a joke.
However, the screenshots looked good. :)
That comment is there specifically to drive engagement up with all of the people correcting me in the comments.
Lying is a great way to get engagement in the post, and then see your project crash and burn.
I’m only interested in your rant in a few weeks when nobody cares.
Fair!
Ah, the 4chan method of engagement, right?
Richard Stallman cares more about what is running on your computer than he does about what is running on a server.
Fair point though
Wow this is great!
if you are using your own index, I think you could use a more economical approach to fight the spam bullshit of the modern web.
This could fix the web as it currently is, by rethinking what should be found, pushed etc. Rating websites by quality could also be helpful.
Also if you support payments in crypto or cash, there should be no problem to make it paid.
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