BrunoBernardino

More of a service than an app, my wife and I have been building a paid and private search engine, ad-free, focused on personal search customization. It's called Uruky and it's at https://uruky.com

There's no personal information necessary whatsoever (when you signup, you're assigned a randomly-generated account number, which is what's used to login). You can get 2h of a free trial _if_ you pass a local and private proof-of-work captcha. Then you top-up your account with a payment, and that's it (you can even use crypto via our ProxyStore partnership [1]). No subscription, no data from you is stored in your database.

This month we reached 250 monthly active accounts, _nearing_ 300, but _hopefully_ that'll happen next month. It's much harder without a subscription and social media ads, but we wouldn't want it any other way.

Oh, you also get the source code after 12 months (BUSL -> AGPLv3 in 2 years).

[1]: https://digitalgoods.proxysto.re/en/brand/uruky

Thank you for your support! Uruky co-founder, here. Let me know if you run into any trouble, confusion, or just have any suggestions (email or a reply here is fine), so we can help!

Thank you so much for the mention! Uruky co-founder, here. Let me know if there's some specific feature you'd like to see added (email or a reply here is fine), so we can evaluate!

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!

Most of the cost is storage (database, indexes) and memory (RAM, search), and most of the risk is crawlers (they fail, they're reported as abuse, etc.).

You can look for Common Crawl or Open Web Index for dataset sizes and how many URLs those include to get a sense of baseline storage costs, and then 2x that for minimum usability.

It's honestly a bit tough to accept that we got a report of abuse and are still dealing with the aftermath of that after having a single crawler go haywire for a few hours (because we play nice and identify ourselves properly), but these... "mysterious" bots that keep hitting all the servers everywhere thousands of times per day just go on like nothing's happening and "no one"'s to blame.

Common Crawl is a really cool project! We're looking to implement a similar EU-based version: https://openwebindex.eu

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!

Thanks, please reach out via email if you run into any trouble or have any questions/suggestions!

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.

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.

Thanks! I'll experiment with that next month, then!

This is my bad. We've heard a few people complain that the word "personalization" has been adopted by the ad industry and it makes people shiver when reading it. In our case it means "personal search customization", meaning you can customize the experience as you prefer (UI, domain rewrites, search providers, boosts, etc.). We don't log or track any search queries. I've fixed this in a couple of places but it seems I missed some others, so I'll be fixing it promptly.

Meanwhile, I hope that answers your question? Let me know if you'd like some further clarification.

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.

Not public-facing search engines, but internal ones and privacy-focused software, yes. Thanks!

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.

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).

Yes, why would you think otherwise?

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

[2]: https://digitalgoods.proxysto.re/en/brand/uruky

[3]: https://caddyserver.com

Hister is a great idea and the creator is a really nice person, please give it an honest look and consider supporting them (I'm Uruky's co-founder and we sponsored them)!

We just published this page with some information about threat models with search engines and Uruky, to try and inform more people.

If you have some comments/suggestions or notice something is wrong/incomplete, I'd appreciate being told about it.

This is _very_ interesting, thanks for building and sharing it, Colin!

I've got a couple of decent-sized products running on Deno (and I've been a fan since it came out, not so much since 1.0 and 2.0, but still feel it's better than Node), but Node has been catching up and Deno has slowed down, so this might be the "compatibility middleware" that'll get me to move things back to Node.

Will keep a close eye on it.

Hister is a really cool and novel idea. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for commenting! We do not "forbid" AI or are "anti-AI". You can use agents within the rate limits (which are public in the FAQ).

We don't plan to build AI tools into the search (specifically Gen AI/LLMs).

But the tag mostly indicates that the product is built "by hand", not "vibe-coded", and that it's not about an AI-related product/service, if that makes sense.

Oh, wow, thanks for sharing, I wasn’t aware of that post! We’ve tried to reach out to European Alternetives before, but never got a reply, unfortunately.

Thank you so much! We would definitely love to have that happen, too! We couldn’t have imagined we’d get to 100 monthly active accounts so soon (and now past 150), but we’d need at least an order of magnitude more in order to have it be sustainable as a full time business for us.

That being said, it definitely looks possible, so we’re excited! As it stands, it’s already sustainable part-time and can go long-term.

[NO-AI]

My wife and I continue to work on Uruky [1], a simpler Kagi alternative, based in the EU.

Last month we launched image search (got out of beta this month), added our own index and crawler (via Uruky Site Search [2]), and reached 100 monthly active accounts (we’ve passed 150 now)! You can also see a privacy-focused independent blogger wrote about us [3]!!

You can check out the main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you can download a copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here in HN)!

You can also now get a free trial for 2 hours 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.

Feature-wise, for June we’ve already added a ton of personalization and privacy-increasing features like URL rewrites, cash-by-mail payments, and anonymous vouchers! Upcoming is partnering with ProxyStore to sell vouchers (we’re currently in talks for this), so you can buy vouchers with XMR/Monero or other cryptocurrencies. Then we’ll be looking into increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web.

Thank you for your kindness!

[1]: https://uruky.com

[2]: https://uruky.com/site-search

[3]: https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uru...

Thanks. They did respond after a few days, we're in touch with them now and will try to run a trial selling Uruky vouchers there!

Gotcha. We're now building vouchers for ProxyStore to sell them.

Thanks for confirming!

Thanks, will double-check with our lawyers on that, but it seems that'll be possible and the way to go!