Privacy

31939 readers

811 users here now

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 :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

244

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Isn't that literally what the GPL3 exists to prevent? So called "tivoization"?

You know what would really make stallman smile is if you licensed it under something that requires sharing the source and all modifications.

Also solves the cost problem since you no longer have to support the infrastructure for all users just a small subset. I already host searxng and it's not great but I host it because I support projects that encourage self hosting and we need more free and open source search options

Also how is your product getting used by another company "going to waste" all your work? Maybe you mean take advantage of without paying? But if that's the case and money is such a big deal how is advertising off the table? Unless you're trying to compete with kagi, but you're facing a huge uphill struggle if you plan to monitize and not be open source/self hostable..

If on the other hand you change your mind about it, I'll be one of many self hosting fans who will happily deploy and contribute to improve the project in any way possible. (Currently self hosting searxng here)

That said, even if it's not fully open, really looking forward to seeing the project grow, it sounds like you have your hearts in the right place and we sure do need something better.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

the goal is to prevent competition, not promote it.

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

Not sure I follow your reasoning here... Having commercial forks isn't necessarily "competition" or if it is it's not always a bad thing. I suppose you could look at something like say Debian as being in "competition” with Ubuntu, but they both promote the underlying linux kernel and benefit from each other's improvements, while one is very much for profit while the other is a very well funded non profit organization.