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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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] 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] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

Personally I pay for Kagi which has been decent enough

Whats "decent enough" mean? I've been curious and you're the only person I've known who pays for it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I never thought id pay for Kagi and that paying for a search engine was ridiculous. Then I kept seeing loudly positive feedback from reputable people in my circle and tried the trial.

I pay for it and never have the "I only ever use !g on duckduckgo" problem.

Sorting by web pages with least ad trackers is a cheat code to find old style websites with people sharing knowledge for knowledge's sake rather than profit.

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