Just this morning I bought a month of this to try it out and honestly, I’m already sold on it. The concept is a lot like Kagi: a paid search engine without ads and some great customisation, such as prioritising, pinning and blocking certain sites. Main differences: Uruky is EU-based, with even its results only based on EU-based search indexes; its creators do not want it to turn into a sprawling service provider like Google or Kagi; and it’s AI-free. Here’s an interview with Bruno, half of the husband-and-wife team behind the project.
Though this would be of interest to some of the users here.
Interesting to see new contenders in this space. I noticed that Bruno mentions offhand the absence of LLM features but doesn’t really treat that as a selling point, which is a missed opportunity if you ask me. (See for instance Kagi Criticism on the indie web wiki.)
Yes, I agree that going all-in on being the AI-free option would draw in more people. Just see the number of people in the Kagi forum saying they’d even be prepared to pay more for an AI-free tier - they’re just waiting to be snapped up by a wily AI-negative competitor.
For the moment there are a few drawbacks to Uruky that I’m happy to endure, knowing this project is only a few months old.
images don’t pop up in a nice little subwindow when you click them. You’re taken straight to a new tab with a cached version of the image, which doesn’t always exist.
there is no ‘verbatim’ mode like Kagi has, which I had set as the default because I don’t like my results muddled with stuff that kinda sounds like what I typed.
That’s it for now. As for search, I’ve not felt like anything’s obviously worse than what I had before.
Wow, I was quite quickly bought into trying it out. I still wonder if it will perform well, and if it’ll live, but after hopping across a couple of the search options like Qwant, SearXNG, Startpage — I’m willing to give a paid search option a chance. I wasn’t with Kagi as I found out about them after they went sour and people started being on the fence about it.
Feels like I agree with a lot that the lead engineer Bruno had to say about privacy and mechanics too — Mullvad’s payment system is a wonderful thing in my eyes as well! I also support the recent push for Europe to become self-sufficient and autonomous in the tech space.
Thanks for sharing, this may just be a diamond in the rough!