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] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I wonder what a distributed search engine would look like.

Isn't that what Searx is/can be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx#Instances

I admit it's not something I've looked closely at.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

No, Searx is a metasearch engine that queries and aggregates results from multiple normal search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

A distributed search engine would be more like YaCy, which does its own crawling and stores the index as a distributed hash table shared across all instances.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Exactly. The main difference I would bring is a web client that hooks into the network, and perhaps an alternative client (e.g. I'm interested in Tauri, so I may rewrite part of the BE to Rust).

But I'm probably not going to start on this project on my own. DDG is good enough for now, so I'm putting my efforts elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Ah thanks - appreciate the clarification.