We're building a search engine to compete with DuckDuckGo. No JS, no WASM, no spying. Just a statically generated results page.

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

phoneymouse,

Good to know you aren’t using SQL on the front end

Deflaktor,

Seems like you would be a direct competitor to kagi.com

solrize,

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.

foofiepie,

It still needs a name and logo.

Index. Tell it like it is.

wischi,

“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 🤣

Mubelotix,
@Mubelotix@jlai.lu avatar

Every dependency is a security hole

NoLifeGaming,

Sounds interesting! I saw some other guy post about how you guys wouldn’t pick pro ukrainian content over pro russian and I think that’s the right thing to do. I always found it “interesting” that youtube will always promote the legacy media (in my eyes akin to propaganda) whenever you search for news or current events. Look forward to seeing where this goes and i hope you have an open policy about decisions in the search engine about what you promote vs demote. Who knows what else the other engines are promoting when people search to skew their views.

Sotuanduso,

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?

space,

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.

ShortN0te,

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.

source

ProdigalFrog,

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.

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/a0e22c7f-59f8-4944-ae0b-71542fa153e2.webp

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

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/fa78e666-03ad-4a5a-8845-0e4983804a25.webp

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/90e87d3a-7d2a-4aab-9979-6b468d93d4ae.webp

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

PrincessLeiasCat,

Thank you for taking the time to point this out.

Chadus_Maximus, (edited )

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

testeronious,

put the URLs below the titles and make the urls use a lighter color, like a shade of gray instead of black

octopus_ink, (edited )

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. :)

possiblylinux127,

Richard Stallman cares more about what is running on your computer than he does about what is running on a server.

Fair point though

UnHidden,

That comment is there specifically to drive engagement up with all of the people correcting me in the comments.

octopus_ink,

Fair!

rar,

Ah, the 4chan method of engagement, right?

Railcar8095,

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.

Pantherina,

image1

Pantherina,

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.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

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.

Lemongrab,

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.

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