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Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

xonaly.com

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#21

Interesting, but 1.3 million pages is somewhat limited. They seem to have done a good job indexing Wikipedia. I'm curious, why not scan the full ipv4 address space and index the main page of every website you find?

You won't be able to scan most of websites this way because most servers expect you to also pass a valid hostname. However you can use domain lists, for example https://purecrawl.com/en/download/domains (or https://domains-monitor.com/ which is paid but has more domains) as an initial seed shouldn't be too bad, but you'll have to ingest terabytes of spammy/low quality content.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#25

Interesting, but 1.3 million pages is somewhat limited. They seem to have done a good job indexing Wikipedia. I'm curious, why not scan the full ipv4 address space and index the main page of every website you find?

For being such a small index, it's sooo slow to search

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#26
post #25

Interesting, but 1.3 million pages is somewhat limited. They seem to have done a good job indexing Wikipedia. I'm curious, why not scan the full ipv4 address space and index the main page of every website you find?

For being such a small index, it's sooo slow to search

Probably experiencing the HN hug

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#28
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a critical piece of information to convince me to switch to this. I'm quite interested though! Also, what's the context of "Built in Canada"? What's the point of mentioning this? Should I expect the results to be better for Canadian content?

This is the founder: https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/ I guess he’s psyched about being Canadian? Anyway, nothing about funding. The privacy-first stance is certainly welcome.

The Google matches for this name are inconsistent and suspicious. Did the LLM just pick a random name?

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#29
It lacks, a lot, also the icon resembles the x org. I know in Canada now there’s the trend of “sovereign” data or whatever, but who are we kidding? I know plenty of critical infrastructure org and they rely 95% on US based cloud products, from operation to security, so that sovereign whatever isn’t happening any time soon.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#30
post #16
post #3

The search engine does indeed seem to be fully custom - the results for niche topics are quite bad, but that at least means it's not a Bing frontend, so it's forgivable. Although I wonder why the authors decided to go 100% custom instead of (partially?) reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine. On an unrelated note: why do some people use LLMs to write all the text in t…

I wondered if the whole thing was just a vibe coded weekend project. It’s hard to gauge the seriousness and level of effort but without some evidence to the contrary I’m guessing it’s all LLM generated.

I’m also curious how OP came about this? No comments on the post, two comments on HN, most history are submissions that are almost all [dead]
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