PriEco: Open-source, private search engine

1 points by JojoYou 2 years ago | 13 comments

Hello Hacker news community! I am a founder of PriEco and would like to tell you about it. Link: https://search.jojoyou.org/

PriEco is a web search engine. Its initial goal was to provide the world with a fully private and eco-friendly search engine. It never tracks you, stores, sells nor shares your data. The only analytics we have is a daily search count, no user count nor anything else. As well as your IP address is never saved to the disk. Future privacy-friendly analytics may come, but they will 100% be opt-in. PriEco is hosted in Switzerland!

Unfortunately, along our journey we needed to choose between increased PriEco's privacy, security, and control and its eco-friendliness. With help of community vote, we decided to temporarily get rid of eco-friendliness as not many people actually cared about it and people wanted more privacy and security. Nonetheless, as time goes, we are fully committed to one day bring it back. By eco-friendliness I mean: efficient software, hosted on servers powered by energy from renewable sources and even donating part of our profit to charities.

A really praised feature of PriEco is that it is open source with AGPL v3 license. There are not many search engines that are open source and no mainstream ones. Source code: https://codeberg.org/JojoYou/PriEco License: https://codeberg.org/JojoYou/PriEco/src/branch/master/LICENCE.md

Now I would like to talk about search results sources. We get results from most of the big sources: Google, Bing, Brave search and Mojeek, and some smaller sources as https://openverse.org/. Not only that, but we are building our own index. It currently has indexed: 1 387 604 web pages 1 846 635 images 1 574 171 search suggestions 1 027 634 reddit posts 141 258 youtube videos 134 634 wikipedia sites 54 920 news articles it is still growing, faster and faster as time goes on!

Other than this there are more interesting features as multi bang and many upcoming.

Thank you for reading my post, if you have any questions or suggestions, I am here and ready to respond to your feedback.

anenefan 2 years ago |

Reading through previous comments ... yes smart to check for cached google results and use them only ... my experience about maybe 1 to 2 % of non cached results ever had any useful info in them, so ignoring non cached is the way to go - I say that as someone who typically conducted at least a couple hundred focused searches (ie the use of numerous switches which used to work with google) on google every day up until around 2014 or so - as well as a few other search engines to seek out the really hard to find stuff. [If it were easy it wouldn't have been something I'd be doing.]

Further comment though is, though I'm unsure if quotes in the search box do the same thing, what makes a really good search engine is if all the words placed in the search box, are included in results. I'm not seeing this ... in fact I just tested and a third of the page were results that only had one of the key words. I just modified the settings to turn off safe mode and set to all regions ... sadly the site now is just white apart from the search bar ... no results. Set it back and it's sort of working ...

JojoYou 2 years ago | |

The white page should be fixed now. I am unsure about the quotes.

Maybe you are using https://search.jojoyou.org/pri version? This version uses only own index and I haven't added there support for quotes yet.

In https://search.jojoyou.org/ quotes should work. (But I haven't done any changes to it yet)

anenefan 2 years ago | | |

A much better experience, quotes appear to work. As for a page of white with search bar, I still get this with setting safe off, changing region appears to be fixed.

JojoYou 2 years ago | |

Hey, thank you for the feedback! I will look into it, I guess there is somewhere bug with the quotes as well as the white page.

Sorry for it, will get back to you when fixed.

mdaniel 2 years ago |

friend, don't do this: https://codeberg.org/JojoYou/PriEco/src/branch/master/api/go...

JojoYou 2 years ago | |

Hey, thank you for the comment. What is wrong about it?

Nilithus 2 years ago | | |

This is insecure code that is susceptible to SQL injection. Check out https://phptherightway.com/#databases and read the PDO section. It gives almost your exact code as an example of what not to do. Look at using PDO bound parameters. You never want to concat strings together to create sql. Especially with strings that come from untrusted sources.

slater 2 years ago |

So you're... scraping Google...?

JojoYou 2 years ago | |

If you are referring to https://codeberg.org/JojoYou/PriEco/src/branch/master/api/go... It is SQL call to check if google results for that query are cached, or if it needs to call Google API

JojoYou 2 years ago | |

I use Google API. Yes, I do cache Google results into a database. And build own index! (The index is independent of Google results)