Shoutout to https://uruky.com/

It’s a paid private search engine.

https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uruky-a-private-search-engine/

Trying them out right now, so far so good!

Go to https://ecosia.org/ in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.

For what it’s worth i’ve been using them for like a year and I clear my cookies often and never got this AI overview thingy you’re talking about. I actually have no clue how it even looks like.

I was thinking the same thing recently. It’s not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it’s not just AI.

1. All sorts of paywalls especially in news sites.
2. Everything is getting centralized into a few sites and they’re usually eithe poorly indexable or not at all (Discord, facebook, X, Instagram and so on)
3. Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon) also struggles with search engines.
4. People trying to sell you shit, create a brand even more than before. Because of this all sorts of SEO optimization crap is done like writing BS articles nobody cares about.
5. AI slop.
6. Search engines have gotten better of getting rid of “illegal stuff”.
7. A lot of sites are just presentational bloat with no substance. Very cool looking landing pages with all sorts of cool animations but when you need to actually find the information that you need… the same UI usually gets in the way.

Oh and now we’re getting into age verification crap also yay

It can be read. But you also have to physically tap the security key to do anything. If they don’t get access to your security key the PIN alone is useless.

It’s a security key meant to replace passwords with passkeys, but it does some other things as well.

The main thing which makes them secure is no one can export, read, copy the keys that are inside it, even if the PC is infected.

I also store a GPG key to encrypt / decrypt some sensitive stuff and a SSH key.

You can also use them as OTP replacement instead of using apps like google authenticator, aegis or whatever your choice is. It also makes it more secure. Though I don’t think I will be doing that.

Main thing I bought it was for GPG and to secure my password manager. The good thing is because you have a security key your PIN can be significantly shorter than a password managers password and you don’t sacrifice security. Nitrokey, for example, allows 8 tries to enter the FIDO2 (passkey) PIN. After 8 incorrect attempts it will block it and you will need to do a reset. Also people have to physically have your security key to even enter the PIN. So I simply have a 6 digit PIN code.

It doesn’t come with a fingerprint scanner. Just have to tap to confirm the log in. Obviously , you set a PIN as well.

Not gonna lie I have no clue why they charge +500 eur for a re-branded Google Pixel. Just cuz they installed GrapheneOS?

On a related note, does the US have some restrictions on antibiotics usage in farms? I’d imagine it’s way more lenient. I wonder how they compare to the biggest abusers in the EU like Cyprus.

Also:

If it is said that :

“Under EU rules, the use of antimicrobials in livestock for growth or yield purposes is not allowed, nor can animals be treated with antimicrobials reserved for human infections.”

and

“Antimicrobial medicinal products shall not be applied routinely nor used to compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry or lack of care or to compensate for poor farm management”

Yet Cyprus still does that ?

Cyprus also relies more on preventive and mass medication compared to countries with higher animal welfare standards.

https://mas.to/@Techaltar/116579102714426735 apparently they will start shipping soon

https://www.xprivo.com/search/

This has a lot of potential. So apparently they use their own + European Search Perspective indexes. The ESP was built by Ecosia and Qwant I believe. Will be testing out whether it’s any good. Most search engines use bing or google under the hood, having something independent and still being decent is not easy. Last I checked only Brave had something remotely usable and independent but even then it was not that good. Kagi uses their own but still rely heavily on bing / google.

First impressions the site itself is pretty polished, at least from the UI side of things.

Seems like they have a PRO and PLUS services. PRO is 8 eur a month and gives access to more expensive LLM models. So far they offer Qwen 3, Kimi 2.5, Mistral 3, GPT 5.2, Gemini 3 PRO. Not bad but from my understanding you can only do 100 queries for that 8 eur.

Seems like the open source models are also hosted on EU. Would be great if they could include more, smaller models, such as Gemma 4, GPT 20B…

Will also be looking into their privacy claims and whether it’s not just “trust me bro”. I saw someone mention they were also planning on making the search open source or something ?

https://www.old.reddit.com/r/xprivo/comments/1rq52ka/comment/o9ppycu/ , but havent delivered.

I have to say though looking really good.

https://www.xprivo.com/search/ This is the search engine. Kinda weird decision to put the AI chat in the homepage and the actual search engine inside /search.