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Show HN: My independent search engine focused on user control (slicksearchhq.com)

5 points by nox21125 ↗ HN
I've always been frustrated with search engines. Google used to be the one I always used, but it's now completely overrun with ads and AI Overview. Alternatives like Mojeek, Marginalia, DuckDuckGo, or Startpage don't seem to give me the results I'm looking for.

What's even worse is that search engines like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Ecosia are using AI Overviews too. These features ARE optional, but I still felt annoyed that I had to opt out of everything.

This is why I created my search engine Slick. Slick is an independent search engine with its own index. It aims to be everything users want from a search engine, whether that's privacy, speed, transparency, or customization.

We aim to let users have full control over their search engine. Currently, we have implemented this using custom per-domain ranking (similar to Kagi) and custom bangs (DuckDuckGo bangs, but faster and with the ability to add your own).

For revenue, we WILL be using ads in the future, but we want to approach them differently. The ads are intentionally made very visible (bright yellow text, bigger font, etc) instead of using a tiny "sponsored" label. Ads will only be visible on the first page, and there is a maximum of 1 ad per page instead of Google's 1-4.

We are also experimenting with keeping the ads in the actual search results, and I would really like your feedback on this. Since the ads are very visible, instead of forcing them to the very top, we rank them similarly to normal results (with a slight boost so they stay on the first page). The idea is that if an ad is shown, it should at least already be relevant to your query.

Now I'm not going to make the mistake of claiming "privacy" like I did in my Reddit post. Not because Slick isn't private, but because it's not open source and users currently have no way to verify what we say. We want users to feel safe when searching, which is why we want to eventually invest into audits regularly once the project is in a more stable position.

I've only been listing good things about Slick so far, so now it's time for the issues Slick is currently facing for full transparency.

Slick's major issues right now are result quality and speed. When I say bad result quality, I don't mean bad ranking. I've made a detailed overview of Slick's ranking in our blog pasted below. The issue mainly comes from our small index. Since we're a completely independent search engine, we have to do all of the crawling ourselves. Our web index is currently only around 2.5 million documents, although it is slowly growing.

The second issue is speed. This is something we are actively working to fix, but we are heavily limited by infrastructure. Slick isn't running on a massive server, or even a good PC. We are currently running on a Beelink EQR5, which is suboptimal (suboptimal may be an understatement).

These are only the issues I've personally noticed so far, but there are probably many more.

I posted Slick on Reddit a while back, but I didn't get exactly what I was hoping for. A lot of people told me that if the search engine was truly private, they would need the source code. That's part of why I've decided not to lean too heavily into privacy claims on this HN post.

I would really like your ideas, critiques, bug reports, and feedback on Slick. We hope you can support our endeavour to build a search engine that puts users first.

Blog: https://blog.slicksearchhq.com

Search Engine: https://slicksearchhq.com

Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/SlickSearchHQ

2 comments

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n1xis10t
Very cool, I subscribed to the newsletter. I’ve experimented with retrieval and ranking across a sample of a million pages from the early days of the Common Crawl (around 2014) and I was surprised by how many of them seemed high quality. The CTO of CC tells me it’s because most of the early URLs were donated by Blekko, which was an old search engine that he used to work for. I don’t know what the quality of recent CC stuff is like, but I think it would be fun to supplement an index with this older data, especially because you’d get a lot of pages that are 404’s now (but you could deliver the extracted text to the user, or link to a temporally nearby snapshot from WayBack).

Another fun thing to consider is making a meta search engine that functions like MetaCrawler used to, where it gets all (or a bunch of) the available results from all the source engines, and then actually fetches and extracts the text from the linked pages, and then matches the query and ranks the pages independent of what the source engines did. If you’d like to do that, I would recommend adapting the source code of 4get.ca (at least for the scrapers), because the guy who writes it is rather talented at coming up with and maintaining workarounds.

If you monetize this, I’d be interested in working for you. I know Python, HTML, CSS, am familiar with JavaScript, and have a lot of experimental (and successful!) experience with ranking web results.

Also, you might be interested in reading this article (from 2600 magazine) about disappearing search engines: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline In addition to the things in that article, there was a search engine for discord (“Searchcord”) that went away in less than a week after it was announced here (on HN), and there is this recent blog post which lists search engines with independent indexes, a painfully large number of which went away with no announcement: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... The author of the 2600 article doesn’t really get into theories about why search engines disappear, but it certainly seems like a lot of them do. I’m curious to know if they disappear for random different reasons, or if it’s just really difficult to make and maintain a search project, or if there’s some other common reason. If you suddenly feel disinclined to work on this project, could you let me know why (maybe anonymously with a new email account or something)? Thanks.

vforno
Creating a search engine has always been one of my dreams ever since Sergey and Larry created Google. I've done a couple of experiments but I've noticed that now with AI agents the search is changing a lot. I think it would be interesting if your search engine was a response for agents and maybe agents that help you simplify information from a website. Like not all HTML but taking the most important information. I don't know, it could be interesting. Congrats on the project anyway!