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Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

I'm wary of these things, there is no way I can trust they do what they say they do without having direct access to their infrastructure anyway. And if they are getting results from Google, surely they are at the mercy google when it comes to survival.

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All of the things that look like search engines get their results from Google, Bing, or (occasionally) Yandex. Building your own big search index is not something you can raise $1 million and just go do.

You can do your own search-index with 2.3 billion pages for about €300/month:

https://deusu.org

I think your project is great for how it does so much with so few resources, but most big search engines have an index which is more than 1,000X as large as yours (per document), in order to improve results.

Moz, ahrefs , majestic.. They all have built their own search index. It's not trivial but it's not Google-hard either.

All of these provide lists of backlinks. That's a bit different from providing high-quality search results. Also, I don't think that any of them have a budget as small as $1 million.

>Building your own big search index ... //

The guy who started DDG [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu] shared a lot of his solo search engine creation here. At one point at least he was running his own crawlers/index (but not IIRC exclusively). It might be instructive to search over past posts and find the details.

I don't think he was using anything like $1 million as, again IIRC, it was self funded. But this was a few years (10?) ago now.

If it helps at all Startpage was default for the Tor Browser and is still included as an option along with Disconnect, DDG [the current default on my install]. That seems like a useful endorsement.

You are right to be wary, eptcyka. We know trust is an important issue, so we back up our privacy promises with 3rd party audits. We are the only private search engine to do that.

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