Introducing askLyphe!
(pronounced "ask leaf")2024-09-05
written by Niko Chow-Stuart (Founder)
so! here's the project we've been working on for quite some time!
as many people are probably well aware of at this point, basically every modern search engine sucks. they're always full of either ads or spam, give you a billion of the most basic seo-pandering results, and generally don't care as much as they should about their users, as they know that you really don't have much choice when it comes to how you search the web.
the little hope i had left for just sitting around and living with this mostly vanished with a certain other search engine's higher-ups' decision to collaborate with another unnamed company well known for being run by homophobes, not to mention their platform being filled with practically useless ai stuff.
at the very least, i figured that the world would be better off with an alternative.
it was sometime in spring this year when we started working on a new search engine. the most common method of making a search engine platform today is by aggregating results from multiple different search engines (known as a "meta search engine"), with probably one of the most well known of these being searx.
however, with what we were making, i wanted something that would last longer and allow us to expand, even if it would potentially take years for it to pay off. which is why our first step with askLyphe, was to build a heavily-optimized web crawler and start building our own index of the internet.
since it's been long enough for the patents to expire, we referenced a certain stanford paper written by the creators of that one car company. after some weeks of scraping, using some slightly smaller catalyst websites (such as neocities), we managed to reach just over 1 million sites in our database.
now while it still may be a huge amount, 1 million is nowhere near the actual true size of the internet. hell, that car company mentioned earlier started their search engine with around 2 million sites indexed with much lower-end hardware.
however, this is only the beginning. we've had our crawlers turned off for a bit while we work on things behind the scenes to make sure that everything works perfectly and our databases aren't filled with garbage. and as such, with this announcement we plan to bring our crawlers up once again to truly index as much of the internet as we can.
that being said, even in its early state, we've managed to get askLyphe to the point at which both i and my wife can easily daily drive it without losing out on our previous ability to search.
that's mainly as, since we plan for this to be very long-term, we've build askLyphe as both a standard and a meta search engine. currently, we're integrating results from xbox's search engine, however we may expand or change this in the future.
now there's plenty of other things we have already implemented or planned for askLyphe, such as our "complications" system, a ton of fun themes (of course a very important feature to have early-on), and of course our own website database which we're very much focused on building our search engine around; however, because we're still very early in this project, unfortunately in its current state askLyphe is in an invite-only alpha.
in the near future, we plan to allow anyone who donates for a short period to our libera-pay page access to the alpha; however our main plan for release is to charge around $5USD a month for access.
through this subscription model, we hope that we will be able to keep askLyphe ad-free and user-first for its entire lifetime. and to ensure that it stays that way, we have a policy to refuse any investors or VC funding.
while it's already the (albeit somewhat un-serious) subtitle, we truly do want askLyphe to be the best search engine. and while i wish we could say that it's a finished and perfect product already, i'm very excited to walk the path of developing this into something amazing, no matter how long that might be!
we will probably setup a better system for this in the future, but for now, feel free to send over an email to devnull@voremicrocomputers.com and we'll email you updates on askLyphe as they come out!
also, feel free to check out asklyphe.com to see what we have! at the very least, you'll be able to see how many sites we've indexed :D
for now, i hope that everyone else is as excited as i am for the future of askLyphe!
happy voring!
image made by @cathodegaytube!