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Interview with the Engineer of Uruky, a Private Search Engine (theprivacydad.com)

submitted 6 days ago by noodlejetski@piefed.social to c/privacy@programming.dev

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Bruno reached out to me mid-April with a suggestion to check out his privacy-first search engine tool Uruky. Uruky works on a subscription model, but one of my kids and I were able to test it out for free for a couple of months.
I normally do not test privacy tools on request, but rather focus on describing tools I've discovered myself and already use in daily life. Yet the email conversation between us evolved into quite a warm exchange about his projects, my blog, networks and privacy tools in general. Bruno, being a software engineer, helped me better understand how local networks work, which led to my article about running a Monero node.

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[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 5 points 6 days ago

Great to see some competition for Kagi, and at half the price! Another option, and an EU-based one at that is a good thing.

[–] unglueclass23@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

Thanks for sharing. This might be the push I needed to give them a try. They do seem to be using Google indirectly:

Serper: Based in the UK (Europe but not EU) and using anonymized Google results, we skipped adding them for a while, but the reality is that a decent percentage of customers wanted a result experience similar to “old” Google (before all the AI stuff) and DuckDuckGo.

So I would imagine search quality should be good enough.

[–] logging_strict@programming.dev 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Since AI came on the scene, search engine result aggregators, such as searx.space, have been blocked. The UX is now laughable and unusable.

So why are we even discussing another search engine result aggregator. What kinda different does anyone expect?

As far as can tell, the choices are: AI or AI. Choose!

[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 1 points 3 days ago

search engine result aggregators, such as searx.space, have been blocked. The UX is now laughable and unusable.

So why are we even discussing another search engine result aggregator. What kinda difference or expectation are we supposed to have?

searx.space isn't blocked because of AI, it's blocked because it's violating search engine TOS by scraping free results for other purposes, and the public instances are easy to spot because they're doing orders of magnitude more searches than is "normal".

This aggregator is different because it is a paid search engine. You pay a monthly subscription and they use it to pay to access Bing/Google/etc.'s API, then serve that content. This works differently than SearXNG because money.

[–] hoppolito@mander.xyz 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

SearX really works best if you run your own node, not using one of the public ones. I run one on a tiny vps and it’s never blocked by any of the engines.

Caveat: you do give up some of the privacy advantages by being the only user. Thus, I invited my friends and family to also use it and it still works perfectly well. (ofc maybe just none of them actually use it and they’re just being polite about it)

[–] logging_strict@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago

Thank you for providing a testimonial on your experience running a searx node.

Will revisit running a node instead of relying on the worthless public nodes.