Privacy

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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 :)

founded 5 years ago

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[email protected]

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We're building a search engine to compete with DuckDuckGo. No JS, no WASM, no spying. Just a statically generated results page. (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Only two crates used - TOML and Rocket (plus Rust’s standard library)

This seems like a bit of a weird approach. There's lots of existing nice Rust crates to build with, why use such a minimal approach?

Also Rocket has essentially been superceded by more mature frameworks like Axum.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Its about reducing attack surface and risk by minimizing dependencies

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Reducing the attack surface by not using well established and battle tested crates but reinventing the wheel inside this closed source project 🤣

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Well that's a bit of a double-sided sword. Libraries also includes lots of failsafes built in that you'll need to implement yourself then. And you'll need to be confident that you don't implement security issues in your own code instead of relying on widely used libraries. But it makes sense if you're worried about supply chain attacks.