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Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

https://xonaly.com/
47•backlit4034•2h ago

Comments

Lyngbakr•1h ago
Something I couldn't find info about is how this is funded, given that it is ad free and doesn't sell user data. Is it supported by a nonprofit organisation or just paid for out of the developer's pocket?
cosmic_quanta•1h ago
This is a critical piece of information to convince me to switch to this.

I'm quite interested though!

Also, what's the context of "Built in Canada"? What's the point of mentioning this? Should I expect the results to be better for Canadian content?

mwillis•1h ago
I’d guess because Canadians often rely on American tech infrastructure by default, and current events are shining a light on the vulnerability inherent in that arrangement. It’s a line that speaks to a potential Canadian user base who doesn’t make a distinction among what’s tangled up in their web use.
cgh•1h ago
This is the founder: https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/

I guess he’s psyched about being Canadian? Anyway, nothing about funding. The privacy-first stance is certainly welcome.

audreyfei•58m ago
launching this on Canada Day (July 1) would be pretty cool
tiago-dot-dev•1h ago
It seems like it is funded by creator for now. It seems like they intend to fund it via professional acesa to its infrastructure.

Here is the bit that talks about it

https://xonaly.com/ethical-private-search-engine/

> How is Xonaly sustained? > Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.

tiago-dot-dev•1h ago
Via professional access to their infrastructure via its API

https://xonaly.com/ethical-private-search-engine/

How is Xonaly sustained? Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.

Tiberium•1h ago
The search engine does indeed seem to be fully custom - the results for niche topics are quite bad, but that at least means it's not a Bing frontend, so it's forgivable. Although I wonder why the authors decided to go 100% custom instead of (partially?) reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine.

On an unrelated note: why do some people use LLMs to write all the text in their projects? As an example: https://xonaly.com/how-it-works - it's obvious that the text here is LLM-written, but I genuinely don't understand why. It's one of the pages linked directly from the home page, so it's quite important. At least personally, I always get very suspicious of any project that doesn't even bother to have some human-written content. (I know the whole website clearly looks LLM-authored, but I feel like it's not hard to add some human touch)

Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs myself quite a lot, but I try to always interact with others in my own words. In rare cases where I need to paste some output from an LLM, I always leave a note about it being AI-written.

Oh, and another funny tidbit I just found: https://xonaly.com/is-xonaly-legit/ repeats the same facts a lot. Ctrl+F "Canad", "independent": 10 results, "search engine": 17 results.

tejohnso•56m ago
The text seems like it's there as a basic low effort placeholder.

Maybe it's still a one person project and they don't want to spend their time crafting reasonable marketing fluff pages, so they relied on an LLM to generate that while they focus on the tech side of things.

Tiberium•46m ago
It could be true, but the more I look into it, the more I feel like it's not very genuine. For example, https://xonaly.com/privacy-policy/ has a very strong no third party claim, yet the actual xonaly.com homepage calls the Open-Meteo API for weather data from the user browser.
amatecha•1h ago
Nice. Submitted a few sites to bolster the "small hand-made personal sites" quotient a bit (all made by Canadian ppl fwiw) :)
Muhammad523•1h ago
I tought it was about to say "Canada's independent AI chatbot". Seeing that it is instead an old-fashioned search engine made me smile.
reassess_blind•1h ago
Funny, it sounds like “where is?” (zài nǎlǐ?) in Mandarin.
kps•1h ago
7 years since `:prefers-color-scheme` became widely supported.
betaby•42m ago
It can't find any major event happened in Canada in the last 10 days.
MichaelZuo•36m ago
Yeah it needs a lot work…
rpearcea•40m ago
Interesting, but 1.3 million pages is somewhat limited. They seem to have done a good job indexing Wikipedia. I'm curious, why not scan the full ipv4 address space and index the main page of every website you find?
Tiberium•30m ago
You won't be able to scan most of websites this way because most servers expect you to also pass a valid hostname. However you can use domain lists, for example https://purecrawl.com/en/download/domains (or https://domains-monitor.com/ which is paid but has more domains) as an initial seed shouldn't be too bad, but you'll have to ingest terabytes of spammy/low quality content.
vedmed•28m ago
The index depth just isn't there and at the rate you're crawling you won't catch up to google's ocean cooled datacenter

https://xonaly.com/vision/

Good luck nonetheless, we need more independent indexes.

CurbStomper•20m ago
Nobody Cares About Canada.
dmix•19m ago
I wouldn’t call that a modern search engine based on the results
andy99•50m ago
I wondered if the whole thing was just a vibe coded weekend project. It’s hard to gauge the seriousness and level of effort but without some evidence to the contrary I’m guessing it’s all LLM generated.

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Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

https://xonaly.com/
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