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!

Ahh, you're the guys who posted over in reddit before your thread got locked that think it's a good idea to promote Russian propaganda equally with Ukrainian content, because you don't want to 'Take sides' politically. Closed source too, so that's pretty much a dealbreaker right there, especially for Privacy focused users. We've been abused by closed source software for far too long to trust anything less.

You also have absolutely no plan on how to monetize, as others have said in this thread already.

I certainly won't be supporting you, not with those values.

I applaud your efforts and I admire your idealism.

Unfortunately, the minute you get the bill from your internet provider, you'll need to find a way to pay for it, and your good intentions will instantly dissolve in the murky realities of modern corporate surveillance capitalism.

But at least while you haven't gotten your first bill, it's refreshing to watch your enthusiasm.

Would make Richard Stallman smile :)

If this is a closed source project, that statement doesn't work even as a joke.

However, the screenshots looked good. :)

I got so excited reading this post, but as I read that the project will not be open source, my excitement immediately faded away

• Would make Richard Stallman smile :)

source (code)?

Closed source and privacy most of the time don't mix. Or more so the privacy crowd and closed source doesn't mix. You won't see much support for your project if it remains like that. Maybe a source available but still closed license would be better. Think about your monetization strategy a bit as well. Consider having premium features and make it a freemium product.

Please post when you're ready for beta waters. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Wow this is great!

if you are using your own index, I think you could use a more economical approach to fight the spam bullshit of the modern web.

• instead of using badness enumeration, crawling everything and filtering malware, use an opt-in principle
• have a community method of gathering new trusted websites
• use websites internal search functions to get more results
• use categories to split up the websites, reinventing what people should find: general, news, navigation, science, politics, IT, technology (not code), art, music, philosohy, ....
• have an app or submission website where users can submit new websites, and some form of community control over it (kinda censorship but in a good way)

This could fix the web as it currently is, by rethinking what should be found, pushed etc. Rating websites by quality could also be helpful.

Also if you support payments in crypto or cash, there should be no problem to make it paid.

Looking at the picture, why are you guys using Brave?

I don't know DuckDuckGo, but what's the purpose of trying to compete with it? This is not a rhetorical question. Is there something wrong with DuckDuckGo, something you feel you can do better, or are you just making a competitor for the principle?

"Only two crates used". What's great about reinventing the wheel? A closed source project with big claims trying to reinvent everything from scratch. Nice project 🤣

Pages are statically generated

Can you elaborate on that? To me, statically generated would mean you are pre-rendering a html page for every possible search, which doesnt sound possible? Do you mean that its all server side generated (at the time of search)?

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.

That's a neat project.
You can be proud of your work 😊

But I for one won't donate to your cause, as the software seems to be closed-source, and I already have DuckDuckGo & Google for my searching needs.

I genuinely believe that the only viable niches for new search engines are environmentally-friendly (e.g. Ecosia) or open-source.

Literally no one will pay for a closed-source search engine.

But I like your tech stack, and your project's looking good.

One more thing: You claim to be against censorship; how will you combat spam & SEO farming?

Sounds great! Where do I fill in my sensitive data?

Sounds promising, please keep us posted and good luck!

It still needs a name and logo.

Index. Tell it like it is.

Anyone else kinda scetched out by the title for Veritasium saying "Veratasium", or the title for dark.fail saying "dark.fail: is a .onon site online?" instead of "dark.fail: Which Tor sites are online?"?