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
Yeah, when you say stuff like this, it shows how woefully unprepared you are for the realities of this. You can’t scale, can’t self host for long, don’t see a way to pay for this… When I can already pay Kagi for a fully working, excellent service, why would I choose you? This is guaranteed to crash and burn the moment your ISP tells you you can’t run a commercial grade server through your residential connection. They’ll either cap your bandwidth to unusable levels or disconnect you entirely. If you’re lucky you’ll have 1 or 2 other options to choose from, whom will blacklist you shortly after. Then, after you’re burnt through all the “easy” ways to host, all you’ll be left with is professional grade services that you admit you can’t afford.
Also, you make zero mention of user privacy. So what happens when you get your first subpoena? Or before that, why should I trust you with my data in general? What policies do you have in place to ensure my legal rights are protected? Do you even know what the legal rights are per state/country and how the location of where someone connects from impacts you? How are you gonna handle visitors from the EU with GDPR?
Nifty idea, but way too much “I’m gonna single handedly reinvent the wheel” vibes.