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

  • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
    2•1 year ago

    If you’re willing to release the database or at least the scraper as FOSS, I’d be willing to try making it distributed. The way this would work is:

    1. Users opt-in to storing part of the index on their machine
    2. Official servers are just relays to a network of these users
    3. Frontend JS would be necessary to stream the results from the network

    I also don’t know the profit model here, but costs would be quite low since you’d only need geographically distributed relays with no storage requirements and minimal processing, though bandwidth would be quite high (I think bandwidth could be reduced with something like WebTorrent). I’m thinking maybe users could pay some nominal fee ($1-2/month), or get the service free by agreeing to host data (to seed, you would provide a few nodes with the full index; these could be removed once enough people sign up).

    I’m working on a related project right now (distributed Reddit alternative), but a search engine project may be faster to get off the ground. Updates to the index would use the same network.