Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites
10 hours ago (uruky.com)
You can get a 2h free trial by solving a proof-of-work captcha when topping up your account for the first time.
If you'd like to learn more, an independent interview was posted a couple of weeks ago [1], and the FAQ [2] has a lot of information as well.
For the source code sharing, we've talked with lawyers and are inclined to no longer require the NDA/NCC for privacy reasons shared with us before (signing requires identification), but instead use a source-available permissive license that doesn't allow competition, like PolyForm Shield [3] (we do still have about 6 months before finalising a decision, here).
This does come with a lot more risks for us (it's harder to track down if someone publishes the code or uses it against the license), but given we've already passed 100 monthly active accounts, we're feeling more confident it's an acceptable risk.
The plan is to give logged in accounts (who are 12 months old or more) a way to download a ZIP of the current code base that's in the server.
Obviously there's no easy way to prove that's the case, but we're open to ideas/suggestions if someone here has them.
[1]: https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uru...
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.
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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.
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- 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.
Big plus for not doing unrequested AI stuff <3
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.
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but surely you realize that people going to kagi also don’t like google or bing.
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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.
It's Russian. Indirectly you are supporting Putin when you use it. Those sanctions aren't for no reason.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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Sounds good, thanks for the clarification.
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.
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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 :)
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
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
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.
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I'm not making a freaking account before I can even run a single search.
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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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Interesting! All the license stuff aside, there's definitely a desire for more EU-first services like this.
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. :)
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?
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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.
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?
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)!
Can I (and how to) use it as a search engine for Open WebUI?
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.
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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".
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.
Yavos - Yet Another Vibe-cOded Service :)