UnHidden
To answer your questions in order:
- We have our own index, its not a shitshow of mixed results like Searx tends to be. this also means that we’re not chasing breaking changes of some larger engine when they decide they dont want us, like Twitter did to Nitter, and Bing did to Searx.
- We don’t know how to monetize. Ads are the only option that we know of, donations do not work at all, as proven by my previous projects.
- We’ve already got spam prevention and removal measures in place, but I won’t discuss them.
- We don’t know how to scale it since its centralized by design and the frontend and backend are tightly integrated, largely because the frontend is largely generated on the fly by the backend. Maybe host a copy for each region we’re aiming to acquire users from?
- Our engine already understands 5 languages, and we hope to expand to CJK languages soon.
For anyone who asks, we will not open source, but we may offer a licensed self-hosted version for a small yearly fee (maybe $10-20).
I’ve open sourced everything I’ve made in the past, and all that’s happened is someone with more money picks up my project, outcompetes me, and drives me out of business. I dont want our hard work going to waste.
Mailing lists are for old fat unix guys. Who uses email anymore? I can’t even remember the last time I opened my inbox, maybe a month ago for a 2FA code?
I’ll stick with GitHub because its what I know. If you don’t want to use GitHub, then you can still view the spreadsheet, just dont click the GitHub or Datasets links in the fop left.
Status got a recommendation purely because it has proven itself to be resiliant to subpoenas and the cryptography is implemented well.
Nothing is sponsored, and no matter who I work for in the future, it won’t impact the results. It’s open source on GitHub, and I’m looking for contributors to decentralize control of the spreadsheets.
I have worked for Status in the past, but that has not impacted the review of any apps. The spreadsheet has been reviewed thoroughly by others in the privacy space before I published it, and I encourage everyone to take a look and report any inaccuracies.
The criteria is objective on purpose. Everything on the spreadsheet can be verified for accuracy.