- Hire a UI/UX person NOW! My parents and gf like using google and kagi because are easy to use.

- add the widgets like the football or the show the local store with the phone number asap. My gf is thinking about moving away from kagi because of this.

- the quick ai response is extremely useful.

- Indexing websites is super important. People doesnt know where to put the content in a website or how to make accessible. Many times i use google due to this fact.

- Make a family subscription.

- make it funny, easy to use and welcoming. The branding is SUPER important.

Good luck and I really wish you to succeed! Im paying for an account ;)

Just my two cents. But I am glad, that someone is creating an alternative in the EU. Hit me up, if you want to get more design opinions.

For this service, the "just an ID as account" looks nice and private on the surface, but once you look at payment methods, it's 100% personally identifiable. If it's so privacy-focused - where's the payment option for transferring Monero?

As for the code - don't get me started. Source available? NDAs?

Smells "Private VPN" funny to me.

Does this mean this is just a meta search engine without its own index?

If so, the comparison to Kagi seems misleading.

The question would turn from "why not Kagi" to "why not SearxNG".

> All servers and data are physically in the EU. All search providers are based in the EU. Payment processing is done in the EU.

Mojeek and Serper aren't EU so that's just false. And I'm not sure all the providers only use EU servers so I don't like the claim for that reason too.

> Try in: Google // DuckDuckGo // Ecosia

I would remove this, I thought it was for changing what provider I was using, but no, it just sent me to Google.

Then at the bottom of the page is where I found this, which I would prefer to have at the top.

> Try with: Mojeek // EUSP // Linkup // Serper

- Google has been around for 20+ years, so the concept of search engine and the technologies behind it should have been well known.

- Computing power and Internet speed has increased significantly and in many homes (at least outside of US) 1Gbps is norm.

- Everyone is talking about Google deteriorating over the years and prefer the old Google. The old system from the 2000s should be dirt cheap to run with modern home hardware.

- People's need for search engine is highly specific, you presumably would be interested in searching a small subset of the whole Internet.

My question is: why haven't a local run search engine be a thing at least in the tech circles?

It should be able to bootstrap with e.g. an hourly updated "top 100 websites in 50 categories" index file, and adapt to my daily queries to automatically update the index in the background, and iteratively improves the quality of the results.

The rise of the local LLM users proves this model works.

This way, your customers still get the source code and can use it freely, but you don't have to worry about competition. By the time anyone could use it to compete with you, they would be using an ancient version of your software. The BUSL (Business Source License) by MariaDB is a battle-tested license designed for exactly this use case.

[1]: https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication

Kagi lets you test it offline (go incognito and try) " Kagi Search is funded by members, not advertisers: built to find what you need, not sell your attention.

Try 50 free searches, and if you love it, sign up for 100 more before choosing a plan. Searches used "

On limits - consider changing the short limit on this:

> searches to 1 per second, 30 per minute, and 1800 per hour.

to 5 per 5 seconds or 10/10. That still works out to one per second but users are less likely to accidentally hit it with two requests that have similar timing. Say one from me and one from API usage.

I suggest moving language selector to the header of the page and adding some icons to it - flags or English encodings (EN/DE/CN/RU/IN): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639_language_codes

For example someone brought up making your UI and whatnot easier to use for someones "grandparents". What if you included a "grandpa" mode (you dont need to call it that specifically) that simplies everything and makes it super straight forward to use. I can see technically inclined people buying a subscription for their aging families to help them avoid clicking on useless (or dangerous) crap.

You could also do something similar to Kagi SmallWeb but specifically for EU based stuff.

Currently the UI is not bad but for some reason throws off my BS filter. I think it might be the spacing and (maybe) lines between the results - it sort of makes it resemble the paid text ads inserted into Google Search?

I like the account/payment system, where you top up a random account number for a period. Instead of having to go with the whole process of creating and verifying an account with your data and then managing yet another recurring subscription.

Congrats on the release, wish you the best.

Anyway, Kagi's excellent, their search results for me are significantly better than Google (and customizable), they've leveraged AI in a way thats optional and, to me, class-leading in its ability to help with search. "But we're EU based" is a product strategy that might land you some local government contracts and a few customers whose key motivation is negative emotion towards others but it's never going to be the path to great success. Spotify didn't conquer the globe because they framed themselves as an anti-US anti-iMusic or anti-Pandora or whatever alternative. They conquered because their product was solid. Nobody cared where it's HQ was.

Nice so EU-based company with API available for my agent to use. Right now I am using lightpanda but this my be simpler. I will check it out. Thanks.

Those would be completely cached/pre-rendered, so the cost would be very low and there will be no potential for abuse. And yet the visitors could at least get some idea about the quality of your search engine.

1) type in a query and hit enter because there's no search button.

2) click signup, even though I want to evaluate it before creating an account.

3) apparently now I'm signed up without having to enter any details - what's the point? Just create a new session as soon as I initiate the search.

4) so now I need to return to the homepage to trigger another search.

5) search again, enter again. Now I'm greeted by a captcha.

6) after solving the captcha, I now have to enter my search query a third time because it wasn't saved

7) search results!

Guys.

It's also trivial to run a perfectly working metasearch engine with the same sources as Uruky, it's called Searxng.

In any case, good luck on this project. I personally don't think it's for me. Maybe a better user interface would change the equation, but as of now I'll stick to Qwant.

They make it easy to be compliant with local laws and integrate payment features.

Freediver (founder) is US based and Kagi is an US entity, so must comply with any warrants there.

But I guess they could set up a Serbian subsidiary?

---

Also: The EUSP index is surprisingly good, by the way. Bingish level from my experience...

Google’s index is by far the largest, and my impression is that a search engine is hardly useful unless it includes Google’s results.

It's relevant to those of us boycotting Russian products and influence due to the Ukraine war.

I also like that they don't ask any personal data, even email address. I like services that don't want any personal details. Like with Mullvad, where they just give you a random number and that's your account ID <3 Unfortunately Mullvad enshittified in other ways so I had to move to ProtonVPN. But services that act like that are great IMO. Unfortunately a lot of services apply "Know your Customer" BS even though they are not in the financial sector.

However I wonder where they get their search data from. But it's worth investigating.

I'm just not seeing the connect here I understand you are trying to fight spam/abuse but seems like a tough uphill battle especially when VPNs solve the privacy issue entirely.

I'm also not sure why this obsession with EU is so prevalent and misguided. EU is privacy regulated, not a guarantee of privacy. GDPR is better than what many places have, but hosting in UE doesn’t magically mean the data is safe, it doesnt mean 0 knowledge encryption, no insider access, no breaches, no subpoenas, no natsec carveouts, or uniformly enforced across borders.

Can't even get to the homepage in private browse anymore so must be IP level. Just says "Forbidden".

Must have tripped some sort of safeguard while trying to figure out how to use the API via curl