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
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. :)
That comment is there specifically to drive engagement up with all of the people correcting me in the comments.
Lying is a great way to get engagement in the post, and then see your project crash and burn.
I’m only interested in your rant in a few weeks when nobody cares.
Fair!
I got so excited reading this post, but as I read that the project will not be open source, my excitement immediately faded away
They won’t open source it because the rust code is very likely a joke. They are proud of just using two dependencies, don’t know that their “statically generated” stuff is actually called server side rendering and are hosting this stuff on a fuckin laptop.
It’s probably a project that will teach them a lot. But in practice their implementation is worthless to everybody else because they are obviously completely inexperienced.
That said, that project is likely not worthless to them because they will probably learn a ton of stuff why it’s hard to build a search engine.
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?
Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don’t seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We’ve also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives… Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.
Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn’t ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.
DDG is just a bing front-end.
That is wrong. Yes there are licensing the bing search database but it is not the only one they use. They have their own crawler too.
“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)?
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 promising, please keep us posted and good luck!
Sounds promising
Does it? Sounds like the exact opposite.
It still needs a name and logo.
Index. Tell it like it is.
How does it compare with Kagi?
That Kagi works and that Kagi doesn’t write their own database engine and host the project on a laptop 🤣
Sounds great! Where do I fill in my sensitive data?
deleted by creator
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:
- Users opt-in to storing part of the index on their machine
- Official servers are just relays to a network of these users
- 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.
Good to know you aren’t using SQL on the front end
deleted by creator
Pointless talking about the code when the main challenges will be ops and infrastructure. What are you doing about those? Linking to an imgur hosted graphic isn’t a good look in that regard.
