Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

xonaly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#31

Post by jekhdkwedwe »

Is this connected to Jonathan Bouchard (https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/) who was connected to some shady crypto investment business?

Not sure if same person.

https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/02/28/hyperion-ai-int...

https://lautorite.qc.ca/grand-public/salle-de-presse/actuali...

The search engine itself seems to be written in PHP, the status page (https://xonaly.com/vision/) looks like it is static and has a standard "generated by LLMs" layout and style. None of the status updates are real. It is just javascript animations.

They claim their bot has a Xonaly user agent. However this User Agent does not seem to appear in any of the Bot/UA monitoring sites. I am going to call BS on this and say they do not have a bot at all.

I searched for something basic and it only gave me to exact hits from Wikipedia and IMDB. Nothing else.

On https://xonaly.com/help/ and https://xonaly.com/is-xonaly-legit/ they explain multiple times that it is indeed legit. Why would you need to explain that this project is legit and not a scam. This is a huge red flag to me.

It is connected to n0c.com .. does anyone know what that is?

It says hosted in Canada but the IP space is registered by RIPE, which is european.

Everything about this gives me a weird feeling that this is not a serious project.

I think it is all fake ... or maybe simply a lot less what it claims to be.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#32

Post by tamimio »

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #5
Lyngbakr wrote: post #2

Something I couldn't find info about is how this is funded, given that it is ad free and doesn't sell user data. Is it supported by a nonprofit organisation or just paid for out of the developer's pocket?

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?

> Built in Canada

It’s a trend now to decouple from US, so much hype about it but I don’t think it will materialize in reality.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#33

Post by Brybry »

Tiberium wrote: post #21
rpearcea wrote: post #19

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.

wouldn't certificate transparency logs be a good way to collect most active domains?

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#35

Post by KomoD »

jekhdkwedwe wrote: post #31

Is this connected to Jonathan Bouchard ( https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/ ) who was connected to some shady crypto investment business? Not sure if same person. https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/02/28/hyperion-ai-int... https://lautorite.qc.ca/grand-public/salle-de-presse/actuali... The search engine itself seems to be written in PHP, the status page ( https://xonaly.com/vision/ ) looks like it is static an…

I agree it looks LLM-generated and not so serious.

> This seems to be connected to Jonathan Bouchard (https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/) who was connected to some shady crypto investment business.

I looked into it, and I'm not convinced it's the same guy. The Xonaly Jonathan looks much older than the fraud Jonathan.

> It is connected to n0c.com .. does anyone know what that is?

Those are the whitelabel nameservers for his hosting provider, PlanetHoster

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#36

Post by jekhdkwedwe »

KomoD wrote: post #35
jekhdkwedwe wrote: post #31

Is this connected to Jonathan Bouchard ( https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/ ) who was connected to some shady crypto investment business? Not sure if same person. https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/02/28/hyperion-ai-int... https://lautorite.qc.ca/grand-public/salle-de-presse/actuali... The search engine itself seems to be written in PHP, the status page ( https://xonaly.com/vision/ ) looks like it is static an…

I agree it looks LLM-generated and not so serious. > This seems to be connected to Jonathan Bouchard ( https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/ ) who was connected to some shady crypto investment business. I looked into it, and I'm not convinced it's the same guy. The Xonaly Jonathan looks much older than the fraud Jonathan. > It is connected to n0c.com .. does anyone know what that is? Those are the whitelabel nameserv…

I changed it to something that is more a question than a finding. I am not sure at this point.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#37

Post by nine_k »

tejohnso wrote: post #15
Tiberium wrote: 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…

The text seems like it's there as a basic low effort placeholder. Maybe it's still a one person project and they don't want to spend their time crafting reasonable marketing fluff pages, so they relied on an LLM to generate that while they focus on the tech side of things.

I remember how google.stanford.edu was a project by two guys, with a lot of makeshift bits. Its search quality was so much higher than of then-incumbents though, it wasn't even funny. Hence the market share growth.

I wonder if this project has a killer feature.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#38

Post by stackghost »

Once again, an indie software project provides an abject lesson on why naming is important.

The name "Xonaly" is difficult for English speakers to pronounce and difficult to remember (because it's a nonsense word) and so it will not spread by word of mouth.

Unfortunately, as much as I think it's important for Canada to reduce reliance on/integration with the USA, this project is DOA until it can find a better name.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#39

Post by slopinthebag »

This was almost certainly posted by the author, who has made several new accounts which are active in the comments. It also appears to be completely vibe coded, perhaps even created and posted without the author even knowing about it. It's possible all of this is done via open claw.

Re: Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

#40

Post by wunderlotus »

Tiberium wrote: 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…

This type of stuff just screams, “please do not use me” to me. It seems lazy and full of shortcuts on the surface, even if it might not be in reality. And im very pro AI. I’m just also very anti AI slop and regurgitated outputs.
Post reply on HN