I really like the idea and that it's eu-made a love it. A fee things I see with kagi which are useful and improvements:
- 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 ;)
> Uruky is a private search engine focused on personalization
> - 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.
Is there a way to build a search engine that doesn't involve either building or accessing a index somehow? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, is this for the website builders or for the users, who the "indexing of websites" is super important? The "people doesn't know" part sounds like it's for website authors, but the last part makes it sound like the context is search engine users.
I refer to the fact that many websites don't have a proper way to search the content inside the website. For instance, many goverment websites have terrible accessibility and the data seems ofuscated.
Google solves me to search content in those websites
Ok, so say they added their own website index then, how would that help with "People doesnt know where to put the content in a website or how to make accessible"?
I went into settings, excluded every provider, and enabled "include uruky site search", but it still says "Providers used: Mojeek", and every other search I try shows no mention of the uruky index
It’s too small right now, so we don’t allow you to search it exclusively, yet. Eventually it should become a “proper” search provider once it reaches 100M urls or so.
- Ouch. We get a lot of love for our UI/UX, which I guess just goes to show taste is personal. If you have any particular points of friction, we'd love to hear about them.
- Only Serper allows for this, so we're very hesitant. If other providers allowed it, we could definitely consider it.
- We won't have Generative AI, sorry.
- Could you clarify?
- Check out the interview I gave The Privacy Dad, I explain the problems for something like that.
This is a bug plus in my book, and it is, besides being Europe-based, the reason I've been donating to Vivaldi for the past 18 months. I signed up for Uruky just last week, but I sense I'll stick around for much longer. Please continue being awesome!
Seeing the point on UI/UX got me curious as well and from a brief look I don't quite see where it is coming from, but maybe they will expand on it. Regarding their point about relatives loving Google/Kagi for usability: If you don't already do that, I believe it can be pretty eye-opening to just place some "tech-illiterate" person in front of your product and check if/where they struggle. There were lots of situations where I saw people struggling with steps I stopped thinking about, just because I was more familiar with the software. And while I have nothing to do with UI/UX myself, I am pretty sure that kind of paper cut is what tends to block any kind of broad adoption.
Thanks! Your point is quite valid and we do that. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with most "tech-illiterate" people we have is that they don't understand why they should care about privacy or what's "wrong" with AI tools in the first place.
I got the point. But in this case, you have a fairly low pricing (5€), therefore i guess either you want a side project, a small business in a familiar kind or to go worldwide adoption. The last case, you have to take "tech illiterate" people really seriously.
- the landing page looks good to me, but not to my mother for example. A slight difference in color, placing or anything is like a huge problem for her.
- im sorry to hear thag. However this is being a deal breaker for my parents and gf :/ they use it A LOT!
- many websites have terrible content placing and search features. But im forced to use them. I use google to get to that content.
I live in the EU and I use kagi, but I think you fail to understand why kagi is good and useful. In the end of the day I need a search engine to find stuff and kagi is better than google for the things I and my AI agents are searching for. If you don't get that no amount of better privacy is worth my time as a person as shit searches mean agents don't works so well a.k.a more expensive or my room becomes toastier for the agents that I run locally. (I can use it for boring personal searches, but I do 2/3 of these a day, so I am not paying 5€ for that)
Have you tried Uruky and found it to be lacking? Totally agree with you, but I don't see many people here saying they've had a bad experience with this. (I haven't used it)
Agreed. The noise in tech circles often gets founders to conflate ten different things into a product that no longer makes sense. “Eu made alternative to Kagi”? Cool, we need European search engines, sign me up. “Privacy is such a priority we’re looking to accept cash by mail”? Okay, you’re never gonna build a serious competitor, never mind.
They are very comparable from a privacy standpoint IMO. A search engine and a VPN both get quite a lot of insight in your interests and browsing habits because a lot of browsing sessions start with a search.
I'd be more than willing to subscribe and support the project BUT, I need to address the elephant in the room: The reason why I'm against Kagi is the fact that they use Yandex(be it only for images according to their own words) and I'm sure as hell refusing to give a single cent to them. So I guess my question is: sources?
> For web search, Uruky currently integrates Mojeek, Marginalia, EUSP (Ecosia/Qwant) (only works with French, German, or English), Linkup, Serper, and Uruky Site Search.
> For image search, Uruky currently integrates Pixabay and Serper (image results).
Kagi seems unfairly picked on here. Lots of people do business with Russia. Multiple EU countries import gas from Russia which, the UK just dropped sanctions on Russian oil, lots of countries do not have sanctions on Russia at all so buying things from those countries might involve money ending up going to Russia.
On the other hand Kagi is an American company so is at the very least abiding by US sanctions.
It is maybe unconventional in a public discourse but I believe that it is completely fine for an individual human to "discriminate" anything multiple orders of magnitude more powerful, richer and more unaccountable to him/her than a human. For example - a billionaire, a corporation, a country, a block, an alliance, a military or mercenary unit and so on. Just because there are some other baddies around it is totally okay for an individual to boycott one of several selected baddies. Sure, it is a "discrimination" and it's fine. The power imbalance dictates that it is both ethical and logical thing to do.
It is especially logical to "discriminate" corporations which are not corrupt monopolies entwined with corrupt governments. Boycotting FAANG corpos is as pointless as it is impossible. The only reaction one may get from those is dead silence. Boycotting Kagi and publicly shaming them, may make them wake up and correct their misguided ways. For example, after years of nagging and shaming, DuckDuckGo has cut ties with Ruzzians. So that sometimes does work.
I'm not claiming it's an infallible system and that no single cent of my money goes to Russia. I just do what's within my powers based on the information I have.
In my circles, Europe's (continuing) dependency on Russian fossil fuels is discussed often and at length. This being a tech forum, it's to be expected that conversations would revolve around tech products like Kagi. Off the top of my head, Russian connections are also brought up in relation to OnlyOffice and Telegram.
But I agree, we should be more vigilant about who and what our money supports.
That is a tough position, I don't have a definitive answer. Perhaps you could look at supporting non-US and non-Russian companies building their own search indexes? Not sure what the state of Ecosia and Qwant's European Search Perspective is these days, but that's an option.
There's little future in catering to customers who come to you only because they hate Google. They will soon find a reason to hate you and fill up your support forums and Discord with complaints. After all, they are spending the gigantic amount of $10 per month on your service, and have a right to influence the company.
With Uruky, these customers can now move on instead, and the lower price will serve as another reason. And then they also don't have to worry anymore that their accountant is going to call at 3AM and demand that they "justify" the gigantic subscription cost.
And Kagi can focus on the only real selling point they have: Search results quality. Which is where their future lies and what most potential customers are looking to pay for. Not being anti-Google.
What's wrong with Yandex? Is it quality of service being too low? Does the company have tracking records of shady practices, worst than what GAFAM are doing that make customer flee away?
In my experience, Yandex was feeding in a lot of low quality results into Kagi - lots of pirated software, shady websites, proxy duplicate copycat sites, content that I'll euphemistically call "free speech". Kagi has a domain blacklist feature, but I was starting to fill up my blocklist - I think it's capped at 1000 domains, and many of these sites spin up new domains specifically to get around blocklists.
There's also the geopolitical issues, which I'll skip over because similar concerns can be leveled at other indexes too. I posted about that on the Kagi feedback forums back in 2024:
I since built my own metasearch engine for my own use, where I choose the external indexes used, and I'm much happier. I started building a personal index of the web as well. I haven't used Kagi or Google for over a year now.
I hope I'm not distracting from Bruno's Uruky project here. Not everyone is technical enough to spin up some PHP code and make their own metasearch, or spin up a VPS and install a SearxNG instance. There's value in providing a good user experience for less technical users, in building resilience by using multiple indexes & building your own, and reducing dependencies on external index APIs that may cut off your access (coffgooglebingcoff). I'm glad services like Uruky exist.
Main feature of urky seems to really be privacy. on my own searxNG i would be all the traffic. If I ho through urky hopefully I can hide with traffic from other users.
Yes, and a lot of EU citizens/companies are actively in the process of migrating away from US based software/products to EU alternatives for, among others, this exact reason.
But is Yandex government owned? What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families, and a percentage of that ends up going via taxes to Putin? Are we boycotting all Russians everywhere globally?
I think the OP’s point still stands, but it is a fairly weak argument.
I am Russian and I do oppose Putin’s regime. My family is in Russia, though. If I send them money (which), and they pay for, say, groceries, which are taxed, some tiny part of my money will be used to fund the regime and the war. I am very disappointed but there is no way for me to just yank all my family and friends and relocate them to a less fucked-up jurisdiction.
Doing business with Yandex is a whole other beast. Kagi can choose to use a worse search engine API which doesn’t involve paying money to a Russian company. Are there some market forces at hand here? Maybe a lot of Russian expats pay for Kagi because it has good Russian-language results? I don’t know.
Edit:
> But is Yandex government owned?
It isn’t, but I really doubt it has no ties with it. It would be interesting to trace and see if Yandex Cloud’s international branch money gets back to its Russian counterpart, or if they are two separate things.
Could you consider Delayed Open Source Publication (DOSP) [1]? With that, you make the source code open-source after a specific period of time (such as 5 years).
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.
That is an option, for sure, but it feels less honest to our customers to give them the code "so much later". With the PolyForm Shield, they can just use the _current_ version however they want for themselves/family, as long as they're not competing with us commercially. Or am I missing something else, here?
Regarding UI/UX. One thing that immediately catches my as an Design Engineer (being over 7 years Product Designer before that) is that the site looks bland. Nothing that sticks. Also one UX caveat: you are using your accent-color for primary buttons like the sign-up as well as a display variant for text for the "PRIVATE SEARCH YOU CONTROL". The logo is not a strong one, lacks personality, the font choice is also a little "weird".
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.
> EU servers, EU storage, EU payment processing, EU search providers (Marginalia, Mojeek, EUSP, etc.).
> 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.
As much as I'd prefer a smaller, non-american operator (for most anything really), I'm extremely hesitant to pay directly for search.
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?
We're working towards accepting cash by mail in a month or two, and regarding cryptocurrencies, we've been trying to reach out to proxysto.re unsuccessfully for that. If you know of a similar option, we'd love to hear about it!
Taler could be a good match: it's a digital coin that has been in development for a long time and is currently starting to see real use. It guarantees the anonymity of the buyer but not the merchant (to avoid tax evasion and money laundering). It's not a cryptocurrency (no blockchain, no intrinsic value with floating rate), it's really a digital form of whatever currency your exchange uses.
Now the only working exchange I know is in Switzerland (https://taler-ops.ch/en/). I wonder if you could legally use that from another country... I think GLS Bank is also supposed to have an exchange running in Germany some time this year but there have been delays in the past. Anyway it's probably still a bit early but it could be something to consider.
If the goal truly is privacy, and that's why you're adding cryptocurrency options, then adding a middleman like "proxysto.re" or any other, then you're not giving users the privacy you say you want to give. You really need to handle that on your end, if that's something you want to offer for the purpose of privacy.
Take a look at how Mullvad implemented it, which I guess is where you got the "cash in a letter" method from, they also handle cryptocurrencies by themselves for exactly this reason, there is no way for you to actually be able to fulfill the privacy promise otherwise.
Yes, and I’ve talked with Mullvad about it before. The main problem for us is that we cannot exchange XMR for fiat legally, in Portugal, and we have no costs that can be paid with XMR, at the moment.
ProxyStore should work well as a proxy because they receive XMR anonymously and pay us in EUR for an account number. We don’t know who paid for what and don’t care (we also don’t know that after 14 days, Mollie doesn’t know any account number).
Privacy Pass would also be a good option. You can use it with Kagi, where you’ll have cryptographic tokens that you can use for searches without them being linked to your account. Even if you use a non-anonymous payment method, you could still use the service without leaving a trace.
- 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.
Hi. A have a user report, after visiting the site it automatically switched to a language based on my system locale, but not on my UI language or keyboard preference. So it is possible to visit the site from some guest PC for example where locale would be something unfamiliar. And the language selector is down at the very bottom (I guarantee that my mom for example would never find it) it is plain text and it is in the currently set language. So for example if I will get a page set to Chinese or Korean or Hindi, I wouldn't even understand where language selector is, it would be a set of glyphs unrecognizable to me. Or vice versa, let's say an Indian person would get a cyrillic text.
As a search/metasearch developer, I can heavily recommend Uruky. It is by far the best third party search alternative in terms of how they approach privacy and transparency. Keep up the good work Bruno! <3
Kagi is also a meta search engine. The only Kagi-owned index is Teclis, which is very small and really only indexes RSS feeds of small sites. The Kagi API supplements its Teclis results with additional results from Marginalia.
It would be nice to have more search indexes available though, especially via APIs.
I wish Kagi was a search index, back when I was a Kagi subscriber that's what I hoped my funds were going towards building.
Comparison with Kagi is making them more harm than good. Only way they are comparable is that both want to charge money for search and there are a few options to personalize search results.
Their UX is really at most a proof of concept, not good enough for daily use.
Good question! We also have Uruky Site Search, our own index, which is quite tiny at the moment, but we hope to grow, eventually. Kagi's own index is Teclis, which is one of their smaller providers as well.
If you are building out your own index, might you consider offering it as an API via pre-paid credits (ala Mojeek, Kagi Teclis?)
I'm only paying Mojeek about $10 - $20 per year in API for my personal metasearch, so I guess this is a terrible market to enter ;) But I'd genuinely be interested, especially if the money is going towards building an index.
Uruky does exactly that (it has an API and any searches fund the search providers directly). If you want to _exclusively_ use Uruky Site Search (our index), though, that'd be impossible as it's too small to be used as an exclusive provider. Probably in the future that'll be possible, though.
I'd recommend you look into any of our other search providers if you just want the API search!
To be clear, you don't need to top up (only click the link or try a search) _and_ do the captcha. You can _either_ top up for a month, _or_ do the proof-of-work captcha (should just be clicking a checkbox and giving it a few seconds).
The reason for the higher barrier of entry is bots/abuse. Up until a few weeks ago we didn't even have the captcha option. Without any kind of identification, it's impossible to prevent automated/bot signups, and they can abuse the system to oblivion.
I understand that's not ideal, though I hope it still makes sense!
You may want to clarify that in your FAQ, which states this in the very first entry:
> Unfortunately, due to the fact it's too costly to properly avoid bots and other automated tools from abusing our service, we don't offer a free trial.
Argh, stale docs! Thanks for the notice, I'll push that fix in the next update later today (currently in the middle of adding an optional date filter).
As far as I can tell, Kagi also requires you to create an account before you can try it out. You can of course disagree with that practice, but it is not like Uruky is requiring something far out of the ordinary.
To create an account you only need to click a link (so the account number can be randomly generated for you), not provide any information. I understand if that's not good enough for you, though.
Nice - I like this. Especially that I can also use it via API too and that expectations are limits are set out clearly (which seem very generous).
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.
Yeah can't picture the average user getting anywhere near the 2nd and 3rd limit. They seem very high to me, but the short one I can definitely picture hitting easily under API scenarios.
e.g. Suppose you have 3 subagents getting triggered that all want to do a search.
>can probably loosen them up a bit.
Definitely wouldn't move the top 2. That would just be hard to walk back later
Thanks for reporting this. We’ve used a professional translator for German (though we’ve added many new phrases that haven’t gone through that process since), and we speak Spanish and French (besides English and Portuguese). We use DeepL for the rest but it’s not perfect. What’s your language, and do you know of a professional to help us? If you’d rather reach out to us via email, it also works.
I think it could help to maybe allow 10 searches free (without logging in) just for someone to see what the UI is like or show an example of the results page. It adds a bit of friction for someone to have to make an account and pay just to test the product.
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
"
Thanks for the suggestion! That would mean we'd have to count searches, which we don't want to do. With the 2h free trial via proof-of-work captcha it should allow you for much more than that! I know the FAQ for that is outdated! I'll update it later today with a new date filter.
Interesting. I will definitely add it to my list of services to experiment with.
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.
Can you expand on the benefits of that when there is no personal information (not even an email or payment ID after 14 days) associated with an account?
The goal was to always show you the account number before you went for anything, but your post made me realize you don't need that if you're just trying it out, so now you should only:
Much better. Now just add a freaking search button. That's literally your primary function, and you're lacking the button to do the one thing.
I understand as a power user you don't press on buttons, but from a UX perspective, if you don't trigger the search immediately upon typing, you need a button to start the search.
Your current UI suggests: Type in a query, and then click on "images" because that's the next thing that you can click.
(Also apparently my IP is now banned and now every page just reads "Forbidden," so I couldn't even buy your product if I tried. You really should invest a lot in UX if you want this to be a product that's used by anyone other than hardcore privacy nerds.)
One of the things I like about Mullvad is that I can buy a voucher on Amazon, and use that to pay for the service with a high degree of anonymity. Is/will something like that be possible with Uruky?
"Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD."
Thanks, I see. You're still giving Amazon and Mullvad your payment information, so unless you're purchasing it for someone else, I'm failing to see the advantage? Again, that's something you can already do with Uruky as well.
The advantage is that it makes it impossible for Mullvad or Amazon to associate my online payment with the activation code on the card, and by extension my Mullvad account.
I just tried to do a search and it immediately asks me to create an account???
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.
"Create an account" is simply generating a random account number, but I _just_ pushed a fix to make that "auto-happen" for you if you try to simply search — you'll be presented with an option to solve a captcha or pay for access, then get redirected back to the search after that.
The "EU obsession" for us is mostly about trying to buy and stimulate "the local economy" as much as possible, but YMMV and you're right it doesn't mean any of those things.
Does Uruky provide an API, or allow API usage such a way that I can leverage it as part of an agent workflow, or otherwise, in place of something like DuckDuckGo?
I think that, more than EU metasearch engines, we need EU search indexes. EUSP is already something, but they seem to be working rather slowly, compared to how quickly Brave built their own index.
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.
Yes! Uruky Site Search is our own EU-based index and we'd love to expand it, but that takes an enormous amount of resources (which we don't yet have).
Besides EUSP we also allow you to choose and use Mojeek and Marginalia, two other big EU-based indexes, and by using Uruky with them, you're supporting them financially, directly.
It doesn't do great on recent events it seems. The amusement park Walibi Belgium recently announced a company called RMC is doing a makeover of their wooden roller coaster, so I did a search for "walibi belgium rmc", and it found one very out-of-date article about earlier rumours, and a bunch of less relevant stuff.
Thanks! I'm currently in the middle of building a date filter I expect to launch later today.
Still, was this using Mojeek or EUSP? Have you tried Linkup or Serper for those kinds of searches? You don't have to change your default search providers, you can just choose one from the bottom of the results list.
Only if they don’t provide enough results. We initially queried them all and merged, but that became too costly and inefficient (too many duplicates most times). It should be explained in the FAQ.
Honestly didn't notice Kagi was US-domiciled. Their meetups I think are typically in Europe and their co-working and office space is in Belgrade.
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.
It seems clear to me that a company that pushes being EU-based and minimising US dependencies as a selling point doesn't really want to "conquer the globe". As a consumer it is even less important to me. Indeed, if your search provider has conquered the globe, then it's probably time to find a new one because the next logical step is turn the screws on users to maximise profits.
Great point! In our comparison page with Kagi it should become clearer that’s not our only product differentiator. If you’re happy with Kagi, that’s great, it’s a very good product! We don’t want world domination. :)
> The name has no special meaning but we read it like "Euro-key" in English. Names are hard, and we're aware it can remind people of Uruk and Uruk-hai. That's OK.
I completely understand your point, though. It's not "Google"!
Interesting. Being EU-based is a huge plus over Kagi in my opinion.
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.
Well Mullvad stopped providing port forwarding, which is necessary for good torrent support (especially if you use public torrents and you need ones that aren't seeded a lot).
They also stopped supporting openvpn which I need. Wireguard only now.
It's not enshittification in terms of ads etc but it is reduction of possibilities because they already make enough money on the people using the main features.
mullvad stopped providing port forwarding due to the abuse and the effects a single-digit percent of their users was having on the other 90+% of users.
not because they "already make enough money on the people using the main features" or "enshittification".
its kind of like the opposite of enshittification, actually, seeing how it made the service better for the majority of their users.
Maybe the term is wrong but I really disliked this move. They should just have taken more active measures to combat abuse, which is something all providers have to deal with.
One example: They could have done port forwarding just on UDP. Which would still have allowed torrents (the main usecase for port forwarding) but blocked any kind of webhosting via VPN.
But for me the service got distinctly shittier so for me I think this term qualifies.
I use a hardware router with really nice encryption offloading that does not support wireguard but does support openvpn natively.
This router is in front of my 'arrrrr' subnet at home, where all my leeching servers live. This way sidechannel attacks don't work because they have no alternative path to the internet.
It's a nice setup and I have no wish to change it or to buy other hardware.
I think this is excellent so that Kagi can focus on making the best search engine instead of trying to please the angriest and most difficult customers.
I will pay for search once Kagi or Brave accepts Monero and offers a reasonable price. Can I pay for Uruky with Monero? If you're worried about regulations consider reaching out to proxysto.re
Thanks! I have reached out over a week ago to them via email and Signal, to crickets. Let me know if you know why or how to reach them, or alternatives.
I really like the idea and that it's eu-made a love it. A fee things I see with kagi which are useful and improvements:
- 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 ;)
> Uruky is a private search engine focused on personalization
> - 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.
Is there a way to build a search engine that doesn't involve either building or accessing a index somehow? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, is this for the website builders or for the users, who the "indexing of websites" is super important? The "people doesn't know" part sounds like it's for website authors, but the last part makes it sound like the context is search engine users.
I refer to the fact that many websites don't have a proper way to search the content inside the website. For instance, many goverment websites have terrible accessibility and the data seems ofuscated.
Google solves me to search content in those websites
In the FAQ, they mention they don’t have an index, they just collect the results from other search engines.
Ok, so say they added their own website index then, how would that help with "People doesnt know where to put the content in a website or how to make accessible"?
Uh oh. Where is that? We do have our own index, Uruky Site Search!
On the settings page it appears that the index is disabled by default and not included in the ordering either. It's a bit confusing here!
It’s currently a tiny “indieweb” index, which is why it’s opt-in right now, and not big enough to be in the ordering, yet.
How do I search the index? How big is it?
I went into settings, excluded every provider, and enabled "include uruky site search", but it still says "Providers used: Mojeek", and every other search I try shows no mention of the uruky index
It’s too small right now, so we don’t allow you to search it exclusively, yet. Eventually it should become a “proper” search provider once it reaches 100M urls or so.
Thank you for your suggestions and support!
- Ouch. We get a lot of love for our UI/UX, which I guess just goes to show taste is personal. If you have any particular points of friction, we'd love to hear about them.
- Only Serper allows for this, so we're very hesitant. If other providers allowed it, we could definitely consider it.
- We won't have Generative AI, sorry.
- Could you clarify?
- Check out the interview I gave The Privacy Dad, I explain the problems for something like that.
- Roger!
> We won't have Generative AI, sorry.
You're taking a stance? In this economy?
This is a bug plus in my book, and it is, besides being Europe-based, the reason I've been donating to Vivaldi for the past 18 months. I signed up for Uruky just last week, but I sense I'll stick around for much longer. Please continue being awesome!
Seeing the point on UI/UX got me curious as well and from a brief look I don't quite see where it is coming from, but maybe they will expand on it. Regarding their point about relatives loving Google/Kagi for usability: If you don't already do that, I believe it can be pretty eye-opening to just place some "tech-illiterate" person in front of your product and check if/where they struggle. There were lots of situations where I saw people struggling with steps I stopped thinking about, just because I was more familiar with the software. And while I have nothing to do with UI/UX myself, I am pretty sure that kind of paper cut is what tends to block any kind of broad adoption.
Thanks! Your point is quite valid and we do that. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with most "tech-illiterate" people we have is that they don't understand why they should care about privacy or what's "wrong" with AI tools in the first place.
I got the point. But in this case, you have a fairly low pricing (5€), therefore i guess either you want a side project, a small business in a familiar kind or to go worldwide adoption. The last case, you have to take "tech illiterate" people really seriously.
Big plus for not doing unrequested AI stuff <3
- the landing page looks good to me, but not to my mother for example. A slight difference in color, placing or anything is like a huge problem for her. - im sorry to hear thag. However this is being a deal breaker for my parents and gf :/ they use it A LOT! - many websites have terrible content placing and search features. But im forced to use them. I use google to get to that content.
I live in the EU and I use kagi, but I think you fail to understand why kagi is good and useful. In the end of the day I need a search engine to find stuff and kagi is better than google for the things I and my AI agents are searching for. If you don't get that no amount of better privacy is worth my time as a person as shit searches mean agents don't works so well a.k.a more expensive or my room becomes toastier for the agents that I run locally. (I can use it for boring personal searches, but I do 2/3 of these a day, so I am not paying 5€ for that)
Have you tried Uruky and found it to be lacking? Totally agree with you, but I don't see many people here saying they've had a bad experience with this. (I haven't used it)
Agreed. The noise in tech circles often gets founders to conflate ten different things into a product that no longer makes sense. “Eu made alternative to Kagi”? Cool, we need European search engines, sign me up. “Privacy is such a priority we’re looking to accept cash by mail”? Okay, you’re never gonna build a serious competitor, never mind.
Yeah Mullvad that accept cash in the post are not a serious VPN provider at all, right.
You seem to not understand that a search engine and a VPN don't have the same audience, and certainly not the same needs for focus.
It's ok, we all have our flaws.
They are very comparable from a privacy standpoint IMO. A search engine and a VPN both get quite a lot of insight in your interests and browsing habits because a lot of browsing sessions start with a search.
I'd be more than willing to subscribe and support the project BUT, I need to address the elephant in the room: The reason why I'm against Kagi is the fact that they use Yandex(be it only for images according to their own words) and I'm sure as hell refusing to give a single cent to them. So I guess my question is: sources?
> For web search, Uruky currently integrates Mojeek, Marginalia, EUSP (Ecosia/Qwant) (only works with French, German, or English), Linkup, Serper, and Uruky Site Search.
> For image search, Uruky currently integrates Pixabay and Serper (image results).
https://uruky.com/faq
Thank you!
What's wrong with Yandex? I think every possible criticism of Yandex I can think of could just as easily be leveled at Google or Bing.
I also don't use Kagi because of Yandex, and my reason is that it's a Russian company, owned by people close to the Russian government.
Kagi seems unfairly picked on here. Lots of people do business with Russia. Multiple EU countries import gas from Russia which, the UK just dropped sanctions on Russian oil, lots of countries do not have sanctions on Russia at all so buying things from those countries might involve money ending up going to Russia.
On the other hand Kagi is an American company so is at the very least abiding by US sanctions.
It is maybe unconventional in a public discourse but I believe that it is completely fine for an individual human to "discriminate" anything multiple orders of magnitude more powerful, richer and more unaccountable to him/her than a human. For example - a billionaire, a corporation, a country, a block, an alliance, a military or mercenary unit and so on. Just because there are some other baddies around it is totally okay for an individual to boycott one of several selected baddies. Sure, it is a "discrimination" and it's fine. The power imbalance dictates that it is both ethical and logical thing to do.
It is especially logical to "discriminate" corporations which are not corrupt monopolies entwined with corrupt governments. Boycotting FAANG corpos is as pointless as it is impossible. The only reaction one may get from those is dead silence. Boycotting Kagi and publicly shaming them, may make them wake up and correct their misguided ways. For example, after years of nagging and shaming, DuckDuckGo has cut ties with Ruzzians. So that sometimes does work.
I'm not claiming it's an infallible system and that no single cent of my money goes to Russia. I just do what's within my powers based on the information I have.
You cannot have an infallible system, but my point is that Kagi keeps getting highlighted, but no-one else seems to.
In my circles, Europe's (continuing) dependency on Russian fossil fuels is discussed often and at length. This being a tech forum, it's to be expected that conversations would revolve around tech products like Kagi. Off the top of my head, Russian connections are also brought up in relation to OnlyOffice and Telegram.
But I agree, we should be more vigilant about who and what our money supports.
I loathe both Russian and American governments, what's a boy to do?
That is a tough position, I don't have a definitive answer. Perhaps you could look at supporting non-US and non-Russian companies building their own search indexes? Not sure what the state of Ecosia and Qwant's European Search Perspective is these days, but that's an option.
Murder and jaywalking.
Is that better or worse than Google?
but surely you realize that people going to kagi also don’t like google or bing.
There's little future in catering to customers who come to you only because they hate Google. They will soon find a reason to hate you and fill up your support forums and Discord with complaints. After all, they are spending the gigantic amount of $10 per month on your service, and have a right to influence the company.
With Uruky, these customers can now move on instead, and the lower price will serve as another reason. And then they also don't have to worry anymore that their accountant is going to call at 3AM and demand that they "justify" the gigantic subscription cost.
And Kagi can focus on the only real selling point they have: Search results quality. Which is where their future lies and what most potential customers are looking to pay for. Not being anti-Google.
What's wrong with Yandex? Is it quality of service being too low? Does the company have tracking records of shady practices, worst than what GAFAM are doing that make customer flee away?
In my experience, Yandex was feeding in a lot of low quality results into Kagi - lots of pirated software, shady websites, proxy duplicate copycat sites, content that I'll euphemistically call "free speech". Kagi has a domain blacklist feature, but I was starting to fill up my blocklist - I think it's capped at 1000 domains, and many of these sites spin up new domains specifically to get around blocklists.
There's also the geopolitical issues, which I'll skip over because similar concerns can be leveled at other indexes too. I posted about that on the Kagi feedback forums back in 2024:
https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
I since built my own metasearch engine for my own use, where I choose the external indexes used, and I'm much happier. I started building a personal index of the web as well. I haven't used Kagi or Google for over a year now.
I hope I'm not distracting from Bruno's Uruky project here. Not everyone is technical enough to spin up some PHP code and make their own metasearch, or spin up a VPS and install a SearxNG instance. There's value in providing a good user experience for less technical users, in building resilience by using multiple indexes & building your own, and reducing dependencies on external index APIs that may cut off your access (coffgooglebingcoff). I'm glad services like Uruky exist.
Main feature of urky seems to really be privacy. on my own searxNG i would be all the traffic. If I ho through urky hopefully I can hide with traffic from other users.
It's Russian. Indirectly you are supporting Putin when you use it. Those sanctions aren't for no reason.
Kagi pays Yandex. So you are supporting directly
Kagi -> Yandex -> Putin (through taxes), it's not really direct IMO
Yandex these days is pretty much directly Kremlin, so it's not "through taxes".
That being said Kagi -> Yandex hop does indeed make it indirect.
(I too have stopped using Kagi after I found out that they pay Yandex and employ people who support Russian war).
Am I indirectly supporting Trump when I use DuckDuckGo?
Yes, and a lot of EU citizens/companies are actively in the process of migrating away from US based software/products to EU alternatives for, among others, this exact reason.
Yes. You're also supporting Bing ads. With a thin veneer of privacy washing goodness, of course.
^ Correct!
But is Yandex government owned? What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families, and a percentage of that ends up going via taxes to Putin? Are we boycotting all Russians everywhere globally?
All businesses based in Russia should be boycotted, also second-hand (so businesses that deal with other businesses based in Russia).
If I knew someone was sending money to Russia, I would of course avoid any contact (let alone financial ties) with them.
> But is Yandex government owned?
In fact, yes. Yandex is totally controlled by Putin's presidential administration.
> What about Russians abroad that send money back home to their families
It doesn't seem like a significant factor. The main flow of money into Russia are payments for fossil fuel and trade balance with China.
Yes, we boycott anyone who supports Putin’s regime.
Hate to break it to you, but not all Russians support Putin.
I think the OP’s point still stands, but it is a fairly weak argument.
I am Russian and I do oppose Putin’s regime. My family is in Russia, though. If I send them money (which), and they pay for, say, groceries, which are taxed, some tiny part of my money will be used to fund the regime and the war. I am very disappointed but there is no way for me to just yank all my family and friends and relocate them to a less fucked-up jurisdiction.
Doing business with Yandex is a whole other beast. Kagi can choose to use a worse search engine API which doesn’t involve paying money to a Russian company. Are there some market forces at hand here? Maybe a lot of Russian expats pay for Kagi because it has good Russian-language results? I don’t know.
Edit:
> But is Yandex government owned?
It isn’t, but I really doubt it has no ties with it. It would be interesting to trace and see if Yandex Cloud’s international branch money gets back to its Russian counterpart, or if they are two separate things.
Could you consider Delayed Open Source Publication (DOSP) [1]? With that, you make the source code open-source after a specific period of time (such as 5 years).
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
That is an option, for sure, but it feels less honest to our customers to give them the code "so much later". With the PolyForm Shield, they can just use the _current_ version however they want for themselves/family, as long as they're not competing with us commercially. Or am I missing something else, here?
I've just cancelled Kagi. While it was great. I'm trying to stop supporting US companies unless they provide good value
Regarding UI/UX. One thing that immediately catches my as an Design Engineer (being over 7 years Product Designer before that) is that the site looks bland. Nothing that sticks. Also one UX caveat: you are using your accent-color for primary buttons like the sign-up as well as a display variant for text for the "PRIVATE SEARCH YOU CONTROL". The logo is not a strong one, lacks personality, the font choice is also a little "weird".
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.
As a European-first kinda person, I think we're good with Kagi?
> EU servers, EU storage, EU payment processing, EU search providers (Marginalia, Mojeek, EUSP, etc.).
> 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
Dang. You’re right that Mojeek is UK, so Europe but not EU (at the moment, at least). I’ll need to add a remark for that. We already do it for Serper.
Regarding the servers, our servers and data are in the EU. We can’t guarantee that for our providers, but they don’t access your data.
As for Try in/Try with, good point, we can add a preference for swapping them.
As much as I'd prefer a smaller, non-american operator (for most anything really), I'm extremely hesitant to pay directly for search.
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.
We're working towards accepting cash by mail in a month or two, and regarding cryptocurrencies, we've been trying to reach out to proxysto.re unsuccessfully for that. If you know of a similar option, we'd love to hear about it!
Taler could be a good match: it's a digital coin that has been in development for a long time and is currently starting to see real use. It guarantees the anonymity of the buyer but not the merchant (to avoid tax evasion and money laundering). It's not a cryptocurrency (no blockchain, no intrinsic value with floating rate), it's really a digital form of whatever currency your exchange uses.
Now the only working exchange I know is in Switzerland (https://taler-ops.ch/en/). I wonder if you could legally use that from another country... I think GLS Bank is also supposed to have an exchange running in Germany some time this year but there have been delays in the past. Anyway it's probably still a bit early but it could be something to consider.
If the goal truly is privacy, and that's why you're adding cryptocurrency options, then adding a middleman like "proxysto.re" or any other, then you're not giving users the privacy you say you want to give. You really need to handle that on your end, if that's something you want to offer for the purpose of privacy.
Take a look at how Mullvad implemented it, which I guess is where you got the "cash in a letter" method from, they also handle cryptocurrencies by themselves for exactly this reason, there is no way for you to actually be able to fulfill the privacy promise otherwise.
What is the problem with using a middleman with XMR?
Yes, and I’ve talked with Mullvad about it before. The main problem for us is that we cannot exchange XMR for fiat legally, in Portugal, and we have no costs that can be paid with XMR, at the moment.
ProxyStore should work well as a proxy because they receive XMR anonymously and pay us in EUR for an account number. We don’t know who paid for what and don’t care (we also don’t know that after 14 days, Mollie doesn’t know any account number).
Privacy Pass would also be a good option. You can use it with Kagi, where you’ll have cryptographic tokens that you can use for searches without them being linked to your account. Even if you use a non-anonymous payment method, you could still use the service without leaving a trace.
I have to agree with embedding-shape, don't use a middleman please. Just accept monero payments yourself <3
Once you accept Monero I'll give it a try :)
Given that:
- 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.
You should check out hister.org!
Oh it checked multiple boxes I have in mind, and the website UI is really great. I'll definitely give it a try.
kagi exists for quite some time
I was talking about a self-hosted search engine.
Hi. A have a user report, after visiting the site it automatically switched to a language based on my system locale, but not on my UI language or keyboard preference. So it is possible to visit the site from some guest PC for example where locale would be something unfamiliar. And the language selector is down at the very bottom (I guarantee that my mom for example would never find it) it is plain text and it is in the currently set language. So for example if I will get a page set to Chinese or Korean or Hindi, I wouldn't even understand where language selector is, it would be a set of glyphs unrecognizable to me. Or vice versa, let's say an Indian person would get a cyrillic text.
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
Thanks for reporting this. Do you happen to know what your browser sends in the `Accept-Language` header?
As a search/metasearch developer, I can heavily recommend Uruky. It is by far the best third party search alternative in terms of how they approach privacy and transparency. Keep up the good work Bruno! <3
Thank you so much, Adam! Hister [1] is also an amazing option for people looking to have their own "local" index! And it's FOSS!
[1] : https://hister.org
Happy customer here. Found you last month while looking for searxng and related alternatives for API search with clankers in a personal setting.
Thank you for supporting us!
> EU search providers (Marginalia, Mojeek, EUSP, etc.).
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".
Kagi is also a meta search engine. The only Kagi-owned index is Teclis, which is very small and really only indexes RSS feeds of small sites. The Kagi API supplements its Teclis results with additional results from Marginalia.
It would be nice to have more search indexes available though, especially via APIs.
I wish Kagi was a search index, back when I was a Kagi subscriber that's what I hoped my funds were going towards building.
Comparison with Kagi is making them more harm than good. Only way they are comparable is that both want to charge money for search and there are a few options to personalize search results.
Their UX is really at most a proof of concept, not good enough for daily use.
Kagi is also a metasearch engine, as it combines several third-party indexes.
Good question! We also have Uruky Site Search, our own index, which is quite tiny at the moment, but we hope to grow, eventually. Kagi's own index is Teclis, which is one of their smaller providers as well.
If you are building out your own index, might you consider offering it as an API via pre-paid credits (ala Mojeek, Kagi Teclis?)
I'm only paying Mojeek about $10 - $20 per year in API for my personal metasearch, so I guess this is a terrible market to enter ;) But I'd genuinely be interested, especially if the money is going towards building an index.
Uruky does exactly that (it has an API and any searches fund the search providers directly). If you want to _exclusively_ use Uruky Site Search (our index), though, that'd be impossible as it's too small to be used as an exclusive provider. Probably in the future that'll be possible, though.
I'd recommend you look into any of our other search providers if you just want the API search!
Sounds good, thanks for the clarification.
It is a bit hard to evaluate the potential when you need to top up and do a captcha just for evaluation purposes. The barrier of entry is quite high.
To be clear, you don't need to top up (only click the link or try a search) _and_ do the captcha. You can _either_ top up for a month, _or_ do the proof-of-work captcha (should just be clicking a checkbox and giving it a few seconds).
The reason for the higher barrier of entry is bots/abuse. Up until a few weeks ago we didn't even have the captcha option. Without any kind of identification, it's impossible to prevent automated/bot signups, and they can abuse the system to oblivion.
I understand that's not ideal, though I hope it still makes sense!
You may want to clarify that in your FAQ, which states this in the very first entry:
> Unfortunately, due to the fact it's too costly to properly avoid bots and other automated tools from abusing our service, we don't offer a free trial.
Argh, stale docs! Thanks for the notice, I'll push that fix in the next update later today (currently in the middle of adding an optional date filter).
I'm not making a freaking account before I can even run a single search.
As far as I can tell, Kagi also requires you to create an account before you can try it out. You can of course disagree with that practice, but it is not like Uruky is requiring something far out of the ordinary.
To create an account you only need to click a link (so the account number can be randomly generated for you), not provide any information. I understand if that's not good enough for you, though.
Nice - I like this. Especially that I can also use it via API too and that expectations are limits are set out clearly (which seem very generous).
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.
Good point. We have never had any reports of customers legitimately hitting these, but we can probably loosen them up a bit.
Yeah can't picture the average user getting anywhere near the 2nd and 3rd limit. They seem very high to me, but the short one I can definitely picture hitting easily under API scenarios.
e.g. Suppose you have 3 subagents getting triggered that all want to do a search.
>can probably loosen them up a bit.
Definitely wouldn't move the top 2. That would just be hard to walk back later
Please don't try to machine translate to my local language. The translations are terrible or outright incorrect.
Thanks for reporting this. We’ve used a professional translator for German (though we’ve added many new phrases that haven’t gone through that process since), and we speak Spanish and French (besides English and Portuguese). We use DeepL for the rest but it’s not perfect. What’s your language, and do you know of a professional to help us? If you’d rather reach out to us via email, it also works.
I think it could help to maybe allow 10 searches free (without logging in) just for someone to see what the UI is like or show an example of the results page. It adds a bit of friction for someone to have to make an account and pay just to test the product.
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 "
Thanks for the suggestion! That would mean we'd have to count searches, which we don't want to do. With the 2h free trial via proof-of-work captcha it should allow you for much more than that! I know the FAQ for that is outdated! I'll update it later today with a new date filter.
Interesting. I will definitely add it to my list of services to experiment with.
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.
Thank you! Please reach out if you have any suggestions or run into any trouble!
Interesting! All the license stuff aside, there's definitely a desire for more EU-first services like this.
Do you have Privacy Pass or some other type of privacy-preserving credentials functinoality?
Can you expand on the benefits of that when there is no personal information (not even an email or payment ID after 14 days) associated with an account?
Okay, so in order to do a test search, I have to:
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.
The goal was to always show you the account number before you went for anything, but your post made me realize you don't need that if you're just trying it out, so now you should only:
1) type in a query and hit enter
2) solve the captcha
3) search results!
Much better. Now just add a freaking search button. That's literally your primary function, and you're lacking the button to do the one thing.
I understand as a power user you don't press on buttons, but from a UX perspective, if you don't trigger the search immediately upon typing, you need a button to start the search.
Your current UI suggests: Type in a query, and then click on "images" because that's the next thing that you can click.
(Also apparently my IP is now banned and now every page just reads "Forbidden," so I couldn't even buy your product if I tried. You really should invest a lot in UX if you want this to be a product that's used by anyone other than hardcore privacy nerds.)
uhm, I'm suddenly completed locked out?
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
One of the things I like about Mullvad is that I can buy a voucher on Amazon, and use that to pay for the service with a high degree of anonymity. Is/will something like that be possible with Uruky?
you can even mail cash in an envelope!
"Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD."
I’m not aware of this, can you clarify? Technically anyone can top up an account on Uruky and give it away to someone else.
Like so, hopefully the link works for you:
https://amzn.eu/d/00yFWx41
The card arrives with a little lottery-ticket style scratchpad with I believe a 16 digit activation code underneath.
Thanks, I see. You're still giving Amazon and Mullvad your payment information, so unless you're purchasing it for someone else, I'm failing to see the advantage? Again, that's something you can already do with Uruky as well.
The advantage is that it makes it impossible for Mullvad or Amazon to associate my online payment with the activation code on the card, and by extension my Mullvad account.
I just tried to do a search and it immediately asks me to create an account???
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.
"Create an account" is simply generating a random account number, but I _just_ pushed a fix to make that "auto-happen" for you if you try to simply search — you'll be presented with an option to solve a captcha or pay for access, then get redirected back to the search after that.
The "EU obsession" for us is mostly about trying to buy and stimulate "the local economy" as much as possible, but YMMV and you're right it doesn't mean any of those things.
Does Uruky provide an API, or allow API usage such a way that I can leverage it as part of an agent workflow, or otherwise, in place of something like DuckDuckGo?
There should be according to their faq https://uruky.com/faq
Yes, we do offer an API and are transparent about the rate limits (no search limits) in the FAQ.
I read in your FAQ that you don't support bitcoin payments yet. Might I suggest you have a look at https://www.lightspark.com/capabilities/embedded-finance ?
They make it easy to be compliant with local laws and integrate payment features.
Thanks! We're currently trying to get in touch with proxysto.re for that. Light Spark seems based in the US, so we can't consider them, I'm afraid.
Why do you need to involve a third party to implement bitcoin payments?
Not for bitcoin, but for monero, which is more requested than bitcoin.
I think that, more than EU metasearch engines, we need EU search indexes. EUSP is already something, but they seem to be working rather slowly, compared to how quickly Brave built their own index.
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.
Yes! Uruky Site Search is our own EU-based index and we'd love to expand it, but that takes an enormous amount of resources (which we don't yet have).
Besides EUSP we also allow you to choose and use Mojeek and Marginalia, two other big EU-based indexes, and by using Uruky with them, you're supporting them financially, directly.
Suggested name: Memory hole.
It doesn't do great on recent events it seems. The amusement park Walibi Belgium recently announced a company called RMC is doing a makeover of their wooden roller coaster, so I did a search for "walibi belgium rmc", and it found one very out-of-date article about earlier rumours, and a bunch of less relevant stuff.
Thanks! I'm currently in the middle of building a date filter I expect to launch later today.
Still, was this using Mojeek or EUSP? Have you tried Linkup or Serper for those kinds of searches? You don't have to change your default search providers, you can just choose one from the bottom of the results list.
Wait do I have to choose what search provider I use for every search? They don't get merged by Uruky?
Only if they don’t provide enough results. We initially queried them all and merged, but that became too costly and inefficient (too many duplicates most times). It should be explained in the FAQ.
Honestly didn't notice Kagi was US-domiciled. Their meetups I think are typically in Europe and their co-working and office space is in Belgrade.
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.
It seems clear to me that a company that pushes being EU-based and minimising US dependencies as a selling point doesn't really want to "conquer the globe". As a consumer it is even less important to me. Indeed, if your search provider has conquered the globe, then it's probably time to find a new one because the next logical step is turn the screws on users to maximise profits.
Great point! In our comparison page with Kagi it should become clearer that’s not our only product differentiator. If you’re happy with Kagi, that’s great, it’s a very good product! We don’t want world domination. :)
Have you considered adding Google’s SERP to your indexes (via some third-party provider)?
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.
Thanks! Serper is UK-based and does that. We provide them as an option, but not by default.
> You can use the f=json search query parameter to get JSON-formatted search results, as per the FAQ entry above.
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.
Country filters for Luxembourg and Monaco, no country filter for Ireland?
Oops! Sorry about that. I’ll add it later today.
Does Uruky pay Yandex like Kagi does?
It's relevant to those of us boycotting Russian products and influence due to the Ukraine war.
The search providers we use are listed in our FAQ and all are Europe-based. Yandex is not included.
I hate to say this, but those recent EU alternative counteroffers for popular products bare some really unfortunate names....
From our FAQ:
> The name has no special meaning but we read it like "Euro-key" in English. Names are hard, and we're aware it can remind people of Uruk and Uruk-hai. That's OK.
I completely understand your point, though. It's not "Google"!
"Google", for french speaking people, looks like "Gogol" which means "stupid" or "retarded".
It's a cool search engine. I agreee that need improve in UI/UX. If UI/UX is great. I will consider to use it.
Thanks, if you have any specific points of friction, please let us know (an email is perfectly fine)!
Interesting. Being EU-based is a huge plus over Kagi in my opinion.
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.
It should be clear in the FAQ. All Europe-based. Our current search providers:
- Mojeek - EUSP - Marginalia - Linkup - Serper (the only non-EU, being UK and proxying Google) - Uruky Site Search (our own index) - Pixabay (images)
I'd be curious to hear about your Mullvad experience (feel free to email me).
Well Mullvad stopped providing port forwarding, which is necessary for good torrent support (especially if you use public torrents and you need ones that aren't seeded a lot).
They also stopped supporting openvpn which I need. Wireguard only now.
It's not enshittification in terms of ads etc but it is reduction of possibilities because they already make enough money on the people using the main features.
But anyway I rely on both things so I moved over.
mullvad stopped providing port forwarding due to the abuse and the effects a single-digit percent of their users was having on the other 90+% of users.
not because they "already make enough money on the people using the main features" or "enshittification".
its kind of like the opposite of enshittification, actually, seeing how it made the service better for the majority of their users.
Maybe the term is wrong but I really disliked this move. They should just have taken more active measures to combat abuse, which is something all providers have to deal with.
One example: They could have done port forwarding just on UDP. Which would still have allowed torrents (the main usecase for port forwarding) but blocked any kind of webhosting via VPN.
But for me the service got distinctly shittier so for me I think this term qualifies.
What's the reason you need OpenVPN?
I use a hardware router with really nice encryption offloading that does not support wireguard but does support openvpn natively.
This router is in front of my 'arrrrr' subnet at home, where all my leeching servers live. This way sidechannel attacks don't work because they have no alternative path to the internet.
It's a nice setup and I have no wish to change it or to buy other hardware.
Can I (and how to) use it as a search engine for Open WebUI?
I don't know what that is and it seems like some AI dashboard. Uruky has an API so as long as you keep within the rate limits, you should be fine!
I think this is excellent so that Kagi can focus on making the best search engine instead of trying to please the angriest and most difficult customers.
I will pay for search once Kagi or Brave accepts Monero and offers a reasonable price. Can I pay for Uruky with Monero? If you're worried about regulations consider reaching out to proxysto.re
Thanks! I have reached out over a week ago to them via email and Signal, to crickets. Let me know if you know why or how to reach them, or alternatives.
Hmm, they responded to me on Signal quickly at one point so unsure.
Yavos - Yet Another Vibe-cOded Service :)