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My wife and I continue to work on a private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1]. To signup you don't provide any information (a

My wife and I continue to work on a private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1]. To signup you don't provide any information (a randomly-generated account number is assigned to you), and you can run a proof-of-work captcha to get 2h for free. You can choose among many different search providers (for defaults and per query), including Uruky Site Search, powering our own index. Last month we reached 300 monthly active accounts and released an image search gallery mode, plus a simple calculator and conversion widget! 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 on HN)! Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically (no Big Tech and no GenAI/LLMs). Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications/groups/orgs. This month we're sponsoring NOYB [2]! Feature-wise, for September the most visible things that shipped already were Tags and Scopes (top feature requests for a while). We’re also still (slowly and sustainably) increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web. Thank you for reading this! [NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here. [1]: https://uruky.com https://uruky.com [2]: https://noyb.eu https://noyb.eu

RebelMonk 21d ago
Been meaning to sign up to this after seeing it posted here before. Finally got around to it. First impressions are the amount of settings and options available are a little overwhelming if I wanted to suggest it to non-technical users. Have you considered / do you have any video tutorials on the different settings / getting the most out of Uruky?
- BrunoBernardino 21d ago
  Thanks for your support! We have been thinking about that, especially because my wife and I do not use most of those settings; they have been built over time with many customer requesting them, and it's gone through a couple of "redesigns" to accommodate all the knobs, though the "default experience" should be more than enough for most people. I do wonder if we need some guided "wizard" of sorts for making sure it works as people want it, or perhaps a "features" page to explain those things. I wouldn't want to do videos, as I'm not convinced those would be effective (and they take a significant effort to make).

RebelMonk 21d ago

Been meaning to sign up to this after seeing it posted here before. Finally got around to it. First impressions are the amount of settings and options available are a little overwhelming if I wanted to suggest it to non-technical users. Have you considered / do you have any video tutorials on the different settings / getting the most out of Uruky?

BrunoBernardino 21d ago
Thanks for your support! We have been thinking about that, especially because my wife and I do not use most of those settings; they have been built over time with many customer requesting them, and it's gone through a couple of "redesigns" to accommodate all the knobs, though the "default experience" should be more than enough for most people. I do wonder if we need some guided "wizard" of sorts for making sure it works as people want it, or perhaps a "features" page to explain those things. I wouldn't want to do videos, as I'm not convinced those would be effective (and they take a significant effort to make).