this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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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.

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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

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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]
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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] 130 points 8 months ago (11 children)

I love the notion. The marketing "better than DDG" is a little janky. Perhaps consider a positive statement, like "finally find what you're looking for".

This is a crowded landscape. I've been here since Gopher and seen plenty of services come and go. With that in mind, here are some questions you might want to consider:

How does it compare with products like SearXNG, specifically their ecosystem of plug-in search types?

How do you plan to pay for it?

How do you expect to protect the index against spam?

How will you scale it to a global audience?

How will you handle language?

Good luck!

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (10 children)

To answer your questions in order:

  • We have our own index, its not a shitshow of mixed results like Searx tends to be. this also means that we're not chasing breaking changes of some larger engine when they decide they dont want us, like Twitter did to Nitter, and Bing did to Searx.
  • We don't know how to monetize. Ads are the only option that we know of, donations do not work at all, as proven by my previous projects.
  • We've already got spam prevention and removal measures in place, but I won't discuss them.
  • We don't know how to scale it since its centralized by design and the frontend and backend are tightly integrated, largely because the frontend is largely generated on the fly by the backend. Maybe host a copy for each region we're aiming to acquire users from?
  • Our engine already understands 5 languages, and we hope to expand to CJK languages soon.
[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (8 children)

We don’t know how to monetize. Ads are the only option that we know of, donations do not work at all, as proven by my previous projects.

A subscription-based model might be the only viable one, since ads will inevitably lead to a conflict of interest and voluntary donations are mostly a no-go. The problem is that people are so used to the notion that everything is "free" that many are convinced that online services should always be free and balk at the idea of paying for anything.

Personally I pay for Kagi which has been decent enough

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I mean, a search engine is literally the last thing on the internet I'd pay a subscription for. In a world where literally everything else nickels-and-dimes us for subscription service, search engines, torrent trackers, game modders who paywall their mods, and other kitschy non-essentials are literally the first things to get shuffled off the monthly budget.

If we weren't in such a deep recession that I pay as much a week for my gas as I do my groceries, with rent and ACTUAL bills eating the majority of what's left, I'd feel a bit differently; but if wishes were horses, we'd all ride. I literally had to start growing my own green rather than buying it, the economy's so shit.

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