Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites

I really like the idea and that it's eu-made a love it. A fee things I see with kagi which are useful and improvements:

- Hire a UI/UX person NOW! My parents and gf like using google and kagi because are easy to use.

- add the widgets like the football or the show the local store with the phone number asap. My gf is thinking about moving away from kagi because of this.

- the quick ai response is extremely useful.

- Indexing websites is super important. People doesnt know where to put the content in a website or how to make accessible. Many times i use google due to this fact.

- Make a family subscription.

- make it funny, easy to use and welcoming. The branding is SUPER important.

Good luck and I really wish you to succeed! Im paying for an account ;)

I live in the EU and I use kagi, but I think you fail to understand why kagi is good and useful. In the end of the day I need a search engine to find stuff and kagi is better than google for the things I and my AI agents are searching for. If you don't get that no amount of better privacy is worth my time as a person as shit searches mean agents don't works so well a.k.a more expensive or my room becomes toastier for the agents that I run locally. (I can use it for boring personal searches, but I do 2/3 of these a day, so I am not paying 5€ for that)

I'd be more than willing to subscribe and support the project BUT, I need to address the elephant in the room: The reason why I'm against Kagi is the fact that they use Yandex(be it only for images according to their own words) and I'm sure as hell refusing to give a single cent to them. So I guess my question is: sources?

  people don't want to support a state that has brutally occupied half of Europe

Regarding UI/UX. One thing that immediately catches my as an Design Engineer (being over 7 years Product Designer before that) is that the site looks bland. Nothing that sticks. Also one UX caveat: you are using your accent-color for primary buttons like the sign-up as well as a display variant for text for the "PRIVATE SEARCH YOU CONTROL". The logo is not a strong one, lacks personality, the font choice is also a little "weird".

Just my two cents. But I am glad, that someone is creating an alternative in the EU. Hit me up, if you want to get more design opinions.

As much as I'd prefer a smaller, non-american operator (for most anything really), I'm extremely hesitant to pay directly for search.

For this service, the "just an ID as account" looks nice and private on the surface, but once you look at payment methods, it's 100% personally identifiable. If it's so privacy-focused - where's the payment option for transferring Monero?

As for the code - don't get me started. Source available? NDAs?

Smells "Private VPN" funny to me.

As a search/metasearch developer, I can heavily recommend Uruky. It is by far the best third party search alternative in terms of how they approach privacy and transparency. Keep up the good work Bruno! <3

> EU search providers (Marginalia, Mojeek, EUSP, etc.).

Does this mean this is just a meta search engine without its own index?

If so, the comparison to Kagi seems misleading.

The question would turn from "why not Kagi" to "why not SearxNG".

> EU servers, EU storage, EU payment processing, EU search providers (Marginalia, Mojeek, EUSP, etc.).

> All servers and data are physically in the EU. All search providers are based in the EU. Payment processing is done in the EU.

Mojeek and Serper aren't EU so that's just false. And I'm not sure all the providers only use EU servers so I don't like the claim for that reason too.

> Try in: Google // DuckDuckGo // Ecosia

I would remove this, I thought it was for changing what provider I was using, but no, it just sent me to Google.

Then at the bottom of the page is where I found this, which I would prefer to have at the top.

> Try with: Mojeek // EUSP // Linkup // Serper

It is a bit hard to evaluate the potential when you need to top up and do a captcha just for evaluation purposes. The barrier of entry is quite high.

Given that:

- Google has been around for 20+ years, so the concept of search engine and the technologies behind it should have been well known.

- Computing power and Internet speed has increased significantly and in many homes (at least outside of US) 1Gbps is norm.

- Everyone is talking about Google deteriorating over the years and prefer the old Google. The old system from the 2000s should be dirt cheap to run with modern home hardware.

- People's need for search engine is highly specific, you presumably would be interested in searching a small subset of the whole Internet.

My question is: why haven't a local run search engine be a thing at least in the tech circles?

It should be able to bootstrap with e.g. an hourly updated "top 100 websites in 50 categories" index file, and adapt to my daily queries to automatically update the index in the background, and iteratively improves the quality of the results.

The rise of the local LLM users proves this model works.

Could you consider Delayed Open Source Publication (DOSP) [1]? With that, you make the source code open-source after a specific period of time (such as 5 years).

This way, your customers still get the source code and can use it freely, but you don't have to worry about competition. By the time anyone could use it to compete with you, they would be using an ancient version of your software. The BUSL (Business Source License) by MariaDB is a battle-tested license designed for exactly this use case.

[1]: https://opensource.org/delayed-open-source-publication

I think it could help to maybe allow 10 searches free (without logging in) just for someone to see what the UI is like or show an example of the results page. It adds a bit of friction for someone to have to make an account and pay just to test the product.

Kagi lets you test it offline (go incognito and try) " Kagi Search is funded by members, not advertisers: built to find what you need, not sell your attention.

Try 50 free searches, and if you love it, sign up for 100 more before choosing a plan. Searches used "

Nice - I like this. Especially that I can also use it via API too and that expectations are limits are set out clearly (which seem very generous).

On limits - consider changing the short limit on this:

> searches to 1 per second, 30 per minute, and 1800 per hour.

to 5 per 5 seconds or 10/10. That still works out to one per second but users are less likely to accidentally hit it with two requests that have similar timing. Say one from me and one from API usage.

Hi. A have a user report, after visiting the site it automatically switched to a language based on my system locale, but not on my UI language or keyboard preference. So it is possible to visit the site from some guest PC for example where locale would be something unfamiliar. And the language selector is down at the very bottom (I guarantee that my mom for example would never find it) it is plain text and it is in the currently set language. So for example if I will get a page set to Chinese or Korean or Hindi, I wouldn't even understand where language selector is, it would be a set of glyphs unrecognizable to me. Or vice versa, let's say an Indian person would get a cyrillic text.

I suggest moving language selector to the header of the page and adding some icons to it - flags or English encodings (EN/DE/CN/RU/IN): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639_language_codes

I think this is excellent so that Kagi can focus on making the best search engine instead of trying to please the angriest and most difficult customers.

Interesting. I will definitely add it to my list of services to experiment with.

I like the account/payment system, where you top up a random account number for a period. Instead of having to go with the whole process of creating and verifying an account with your data and then managing yet another recurring subscription.

Congrats on the release, wish you the best.

Please don't try to machine translate to my local language. The translations are terrible or outright incorrect.

Have you considered pivoting or prioritizing different test markets or niches?

For example someone brought up making your UI and whatnot easier to use for someones "grandparents". What if you included a "grandpa" mode (you dont need to call it that specifically) that simplies everything and makes it super straight forward to use. I can see technically inclined people buying a subscription for their aging families to help them avoid clicking on useless (or dangerous) crap.

You could also do something similar to Kagi SmallWeb but specifically for EU based stuff.

Currently the UI is not bad but for some reason throws off my BS filter. I think it might be the spacing and (maybe) lines between the results - it sort of makes it resemble the paid text ads inserted into Google Search?

Honestly didn't notice Kagi was US-domiciled. Their meetups I think are typically in Europe and their co-working and office space is in Belgrade.

Anyway, Kagi's excellent, their search results for me are significantly better than Google (and customizable), they've leveraged AI in a way thats optional and, to me, class-leading in its ability to help with search. "But we're EU based" is a product strategy that might land you some local government contracts and a few customers whose key motivation is negative emotion towards others but it's never going to be the path to great success. Spotify didn't conquer the globe because they framed themselves as an anti-US anti-iMusic or anti-Pandora or whatever alternative. They conquered because their product was solid. Nobody cared where it's HQ was.

Interesting! All the license stuff aside, there's definitely a desire for more EU-first services like this.

> You can use the f=json search query parameter to get JSON-formatted search results, as per the FAQ entry above.

Nice so EU-based company with API available for my agent to use. Right now I am using lightpanda but this my be simpler. I will check it out. Thanks.

Do you have Privacy Pass or some other type of privacy-preserving credentials functinoality?

Does Uruky provide an API, or allow API usage such a way that I can leverage it as part of an agent workflow, or otherwise, in place of something like DuckDuckGo?

Happy customer here. Found you last month while looking for searxng and related alternatives for API search with clankers in a personal setting.

Okay, so in order to do a test search, I have to:

1) type in a query and hit enter because there's no search button.

2) click signup, even though I want to evaluate it before creating an account.

3) apparently now I'm signed up without having to enter any details - what's the point? Just create a new session as soon as I initiate the search.

4) so now I need to return to the homepage to trigger another search.

5) search again, enter again. Now I'm greeted by a captcha.

6) after solving the captcha, I now have to enter my search query a third time because it wasn't saved

7) search results!

Guys.

I've just cancelled Kagi. While it was great. I'm trying to stop supporting US companies unless they provide good value

It would be super cool if you chose 20-100 queries (both common and niche) and shown the sample search results for those.

Those would be completely cached/pre-rendered, so the cost would be very low and there will be no potential for abuse. And yet the visitors could at least get some idea about the quality of your search engine.

I think that, more than EU metasearch engines, we need EU search indexes. EUSP is already something, but they seem to be working rather slowly, compared to how quickly Brave built their own index.

It's also trivial to run a perfectly working metasearch engine with the same sources as Uruky, it's called Searxng.

In any case, good luck on this project. I personally don't think it's for me. Maybe a better user interface would change the equation, but as of now I'll stick to Qwant.

I read in your FAQ that you don't support bitcoin payments yet. Might I suggest you have a look at https://www.lightspark.com/capabilities/embedded-finance ?

They make it easy to be compliant with local laws and integrate payment features.

It doesn't do great on recent events it seems. The amusement park Walibi Belgium recently announced a company called RMC is doing a makeover of their wooden roller coaster, so I did a search for "walibi belgium rmc", and it found one very out-of-date article about earlier rumours, and a bunch of less relevant stuff.

Nice project! It lacks two things that are very useful : website blocking, and !hashbangs like DDG.

Solid EU-first positioning — the "trust local infrastructure" angle is increasingly important here. Curious about the privacy model: Kagi famously refuses to log queries. What's your approach to search history retention?

Kagi's only office/hub is in Belgrade, which may not be EU, but it's (literally) close enough. Employees are remote.

Freediver (founder) is US based and Kagi is an US entity, so must comply with any warrants there.

But I guess they could set up a Serbian subsidiary?

One of the things I like about Mullvad is that I can buy a voucher on Amazon, and use that to pay for the service with a high degree of anonymity. Is/will something like that be possible with Uruky?

Have you considered adding Google’s SERP to your indexes (via some third-party provider)?

Google’s index is by far the largest, and my impression is that a search engine is hardly useful unless it includes Google’s results.

Consider adding favicons near the websites in search results. Way easier to distinguish them at a glance.

---

Also: The EUSP index is surprisingly good, by the way. Bingish level from my experience...

Country filters for Luxembourg and Monaco, no country filter for Ireland?

This intrigued me and I topped up an account. Is there no password? Anyone could "steal" my account number and kick me out?

I hate to say this, but those recent EU alternative counteroffers for popular products bare some really unfortunate names....

It's a cool search engine. I agreee that need improve in UI/UX. If UI/UX is great. I will consider to use it.

Does Uruky pay Yandex like Kagi does?

It's relevant to those of us boycotting Russian products and influence due to the Ukraine war.

Tried searching its name uruky on Uruky, some NSFW results shows up which I did not expected...

Interesting. Being EU-based is a huge plus over Kagi in my opinion.

I also like that they don't ask any personal data, even email address. I like services that don't want any personal details. Like with Mullvad, where they just give you a random number and that's your account ID <3 Unfortunately Mullvad enshittified in other ways so I had to move to ProtonVPN. But services that act like that are great IMO. Unfortunately a lot of services apply "Know your Customer" BS even though they are not in the financial sector.

However I wonder where they get their search data from. But it's worth investigating.

My number one request: let me block specific sites from my search results.

As a European-first kinda person, I think we're good with Kagi?

Can I (and how to) use it as a search engine for Open WebUI?

I will pay for search once Kagi or Brave accepts Monero and offers a reasonable price. Can I pay for Uruky with Monero? If you're worried about regulations consider reaching out to proxysto.re

I just tried to do a search and it immediately asks me to create an account???

I'm just not seeing the connect here I understand you are trying to fight spam/abuse but seems like a tough uphill battle especially when VPNs solve the privacy issue entirely.

I'm also not sure why this obsession with EU is so prevalent and misguided. EU is privacy regulated, not a guarantee of privacy. GDPR is better than what many places have, but hosting in UE doesn’t magically mean the data is safe, it doesnt mean 0 knowledge encryption, no insider access, no breaches, no subpoenas, no natsec carveouts, or uniformly enforced across borders.

Do you pronounce it like uruk hai?

Yavos - Yet Another Vibe-cOded Service :)

uhm, I'm suddenly completed locked out?

Can't even get to the homepage in private browse anymore so must be IP level. Just says "Forbidden".

Must have tripped some sort of safeguard while trying to figure out how to use the API via curl

login gated with a paywall of 5 dollars, could not use the product.