Comment by BrunoBernardino
1 month ago
My wife and I continue to work on Uruky, a EU-based Kagi alternative [1]. Since last month we got deals with a couple more search providers but we’re still waiting for EUSP/STAAN to provide us with an API key (we have progressed through a few more forms and signatures and legal stuff, though).
We’ve continued to get some paid customers and have exited beta last week, given everyone seemed to be quite satisfied and there hadn't been requests for changes, only some specific search providers.
Because of bots there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a couple of days for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up!
Thanks.
P.S.: Because people have asked before, our tech stack is intentionally very "boring" (as in, it generates and serves the HTML + bits of JS to enhance settings and such — search can be done without JS), using Deno in the backend (for easier TypeScript), PostgreSQL for the DB, and Docker for easier deploying.
Surprisingly, I haven't heard of Uruky yet, even though I'm actively looking for EU replacements to a lot of international companies.
I have subscribed for a month and will give it a try.
One feedback already though. Some of the German translations are...not great. For example, on the landing page under the "Not another AI tool". In English you write "We find it hard to do in a sensible, responsible, and respectful way." In the German translation its "Es fällt uns schwer, vernünftig, verantwortungsvoll und respektvoll zu handeln."
The German translation makes it sound like you (as in you as a company and person) have a hard time being respectful, not the actual AI implementation.
Thank you so much for the kind words, suggestions, and support! We don't natively speak German, and we used DeepL for most of the translations.
We are currently working with a professional technical translator for German (should get updated translations in a week or two) and will consider that for other languages, but it's quite expensive to do more of that right now.
That's perfectly understandable and good to hear!
Do you generally want feedback and have a preferred channel for it beyond hackernews comments?
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Hi Bruno - this looks great! I remember collaborating with you a couple times on Kagi's browser extensions. Was there a specific moment that made you want to work on Uruky, or was it because of the overall direction Kagi is heading in?
Hey Alabhya! Nice seeing you here! :)
I don't think Kagi is heading in a necessarily "bad" direction, though I don't agree with it, and I also think there's value in a product that's solely focused on private and personal search, that doesn't have to be as expensive, expansive (Drive, Maps, Email, etc.) or big (team and resources-wise) as they are.
I hope that makes sense!
This sounds great, and I like it being EU-based (and, presumably, not reusing Yandex like Kagi famously does?)
Could you share more info about how you're building it? Like Kagi it wraps / reuses multiple other providers? How do you do that affordably, and how do you merge the results together into a good answer?
Thanks! Sure. We are 100% transparent on all the search providers we're using, you can see them in the FAQ, and Yandex isn't used.
Initially we called all search providers and merged the results in a round robin fashion (so first of the first provider, first of the second provider, first of the third provider, then second of the first provider, second of the second provider, and so on), deduplicating them, but this was becoming very costly and inefficient once we had 3 and more search providers (most providers will return results within 500ms, but not infrequently one would take up to 2s or more — we timeout there, so I don't know if it'd take much more —, slowing everything down), so now we give everyone the choice of which providers to use first, and we pick results from the first two (we're actually considering switching to just the first, as costs are still a bit high and we don't want to increase pricing).
I hope that provides some more clarity! Happy to answer any more questions.
Very cool, wishing you the best of luck with this.
One bit of feedback from me, take it or leave it, but the name doesn't feel appealing or memorable. What does it mean?
It makes me think of the Uruk-hai from Lord of the Rings. To me that is not a positive connotation. I feel bad writing anything even slightly negative about what is a really, really awesome project, though, and I hope that you meet with success :)
Thanks for the kind words! They might not be "standard pretty" but I'd say they're arguably resilient and disciplined, so it's not all bad! :D
Thanks! We'll happily take suggestions, but I read it like "Euro-key". My wife also doesn't love the name, but we couldn't come up with (or find) anything with 5 letters or less that sounded decent so far.
There's no specific meaning, though I can't say I dislike the close name matches with Uruk-hai [1] and Uruk [2]! :)
[1]: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Uruk-hai
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk
I was going to say in my earlier comment that I probably didn't like it because it sounds like Uruk Hai, and the person in the comment below also said it. So safe to.say that's what most of your users will also think of. "Large ugly orc" is a terrible word association for an app even if you personally like it.
Have you tried searching for meaningful words in other languages? Kagi means key in Japanese, for example. I've had luck with this approach before.
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+1
<3
I wish you good luck and a very healthy stamina :-))
Search is _incredibly_ hard, there are reasons why there are no real Google competitors.
Thank you! We're not trying to be a Google competitor (that would be too much!), "simply" an alternative!
I know Kagi is using Yandex (Russian search engine), that's why I am no longer using it.
Is Uruky using Yandex?
Hello! We are 100% transparent on all the search providers we're using, you can see them in the FAQ, and Yandex isn't used.
Why is Yandex a problem? All the mainstream providers are heavily censored.
Given the notorious European branding, consider renaming it eureuky ;-)
Haha! I definitely read it "euro-key", but we wanted fewer letters! :D
Would a family plan possible?
You can simply share the same account number, unless you're looking for different settings per account number? In that case, feel free to reach out and we'll figure something out.