Comment by BrunoBernardino
11 days ago
My wife and I continue to work on Uruky [1], a simpler Kagi alternative, based in the EU.
Last month we reached 200 monthly active accounts (we’ve passed 250 now), and last week we launched support for XMR/Monero payments via ProxyStore [2]!
You can also see in our homepage that more independent bloggers and privacy-minded people have written about us!
The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL,into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here in HN)!
Uruky is paid and you can get a free 2h trial when you signup if you pass a proof-of-work captcha (another suggestion made here on HN, and it uses a local Altcha).
Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically. Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications. This month was Caddy [3]!
Feature-wise, for July we’ve already shipped a lot of visible and less visible things. We’re currently looking into increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web, and plan to add a couple of new search providers in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you for your kindness!
[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service, here.
[1]: https://uruky.com
As someone unfamiliar with Kagi I encourage you not to describe yourself as a Kagi alternative but instead start with what you are doing first and foremost
Especially because some of us used Kagi back when it was an e-commerce payment processor, and that's what comes to mind whenever I see the name.
Thanks! Do you mean on this HN thread? On the website we do this:
> PRIVATE SEARCH YOU CONTROL
> Search without ads or tracking
> Uruky is a private search engine focused on personalization, not an ecosystem. > EU-based. No surveillance capitalism.
Cool thanks. I meant here and just generally dropped the comment as advice in case you might slip into talking that way as if all of your target market are already familiar with this other Niche thing. When there's so many people out there who never heard of either anf might be open to suggestions
1 reply →
How do you get personalization without surveillance?
1 reply →
It looks good, but one of the big selling points to me with Kagi is them having their own index. It seems like you guys are working on that, but right now it sounds more like a search aggregator rather than a search engine.
You also mention not using the source for commercial use or distribution, is that only relevant before it becomes AGPL?
I am also struggling to find how to activate the 2h trial, so have not been able to test it out.
Thank you for your comments!
We have an index, it's just not very big, yet. We had a major setback last month with a bug (for less than 24h, the crawler didn't respect robots.txt) and had to delete it entirely, and have been slowly rebuilding it.
You're correct the commercial use is only not allowed before the AGPL comes into play.
You should be able to click on the "top up" link (top or bottom) and see an option for a captcha ("click to prove you're a human"). If you don't, reach out via email (don't share your account number) and I'll give you a voucher for a couple of days.
Interesting. How much does it cost to build a search index in current year? Also, how do you get around the fact that everyone's blocking bots?
I've been thinking of making a "small web" indexer so I'm curious about that. I'm seeing even tiny websites being behind CloudFlare, Anubis etc. these days. (And everyone complaining they're getting hammered by mysterious distributed HTTP traffic!)
3 replies →
That’s on me, didn’t see the text explaining it above the captcha.
I’ll give it a shot. Always happy to see some competition in the market. And I love the idea of handing out the source after a year.
1 reply →
Nice, cool project.
Is Monero legal in EU? I heard something about them banning private cryptos including Monero a while back but I don't know what the situation is now. (I think it might just be that exchanges are not allowed to offer it anymore?)
Thanks, and great question! I'm not sure about the whole EU, but in Portugal (where our company's based, and where we've talked with a couple of lawyers and accountants about it), you can hold, buy/sell and trade Monero, but not convert it to fiat. That's why we don't support it directly.
With our ProxyStore partnership, they're handling the crypto payments, we only invoice them for fiat and they pay us in fiat!
Very cool! How long have you been working on this? How did you acquire your customers?
Thanks! We've been working on it since late last year, only really announced it here in February or March, I think (I'd have to check). Cold emailing some privacy-minded folks and posting here and in other privacy-focused forums like Privacy Guides (that were recommended to us after cold emailing people).
Did you work in this space before ?
interesting project, good luck
1 reply →
I love the idea. How do you stay competitive with the search results of, let's say, DDG? have you considered enabling an API for subscribers? Or selling an enterprise tier subsctription that comes with API?
Thanks! We offer many search providers, so we're not tied to any specific style of results, and our customers tend to really appreciate that!
Also, we do offer an API (check the FAQ), no need for different subscription tiers. Keeping it simple.
Why do you call it a Kagi alternative and not a Google alternative?
That's a good point. Mainly because of the personal search customization features, and the fact it's paid search. Those seem differentiating enough from Google and close enough to Kagi to use them as a reference instead. They're also a good product if you're happy with them, and I don't know many people that are _happy_ with Google, most are probably just _accepting_ of it, if that makes sense.
How can we trust you?
That's a great question. Hopefully given you can make a purchase and start using an account without ever providing any personal information, it should help.
My wife has no public information, and as for me, hopefully seeing some of my public interactions mostly related to code forges or here, in lobsters, IRC, or Privacy Guides, there should be enough to get a sense of what I stand for.
Regarding Uruky itself and search, we've published a Threat Models document with some more information that should help clarify everything: https://uruky.com/docs/threat-models
Thanks, I hope that helps!