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 their projects? As an example: https://xonaly.com/how-it-works - it's obvious that the text here is LLM-written, but I genuinely don't understand why. It's one of the pages linked directly from the home page, so it's quite important. At least personally, I always get very suspicious of any project that doesn't even bother to have some human-written content. (I know the whole website clearly looks LLM-authored, but I feel like it's not hard to add some human touch)
Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs myself quite a lot, but I try to always interact with others in my own words. In rare cases where I need to paste some output from an LLM, I always leave a note about it being AI-written.
Oh, and another funny tidbit I just found: https://xonaly.com/is-xonaly-legit/ repeats the same facts a lot. Ctrl+F "Canad", "independent": 10 results, "search engine": 17 results.
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.
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.
It could be true, but the more I look into it, the more I feel like it's not very genuine. For example, https://xonaly.com/privacy-policy/ has a very strong no third party claim, yet the actual xonaly.com homepage calls the Open-Meteo API for weather data from the user browser.
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.
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.
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?
How is Xonaly sustained?
Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.
I’d guess because Canadians often rely on American tech infrastructure by default, and current events are shining a light on the vulnerability inherent in that arrangement. It’s a line that speaks to a potential Canadian user base who doesn’t make a distinction among what’s tangled up in their web use.
> How is Xonaly sustained?
> Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On an unrelated note: why do some people use LLMs to write all the text in their projects? As an example: https://xonaly.com/how-it-works - it's obvious that the text here is LLM-written, but I genuinely don't understand why. It's one of the pages linked directly from the home page, so it's quite important. At least personally, I always get very suspicious of any project that doesn't even bother to have some human-written content. (I know the whole website clearly looks LLM-authored, but I feel like it's not hard to add some human touch)
Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs myself quite a lot, but I try to always interact with others in my own words. In rare cases where I need to paste some output from an LLM, I always leave a note about it being AI-written.
Oh, and another funny tidbit I just found: https://xonaly.com/is-xonaly-legit/ repeats the same facts a lot. Ctrl+F "Canad", "independent": 10 results, "search engine": 17 results.
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 wonder if this project has a killer feature.
https://xonaly.com/ethical-private-search-engine/
How is Xonaly sustained? Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.
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?
Here is the bit that talks about it
https://xonaly.com/ethical-private-search-engine/
> How is Xonaly sustained? > Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.
I guess he’s psyched about being Canadian? Anyway, nothing about funding. The privacy-first stance is certainly welcome.
It’s a trend now to decouple from US, so much hype about it but I don’t think it will materialize in reality.
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.
> 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
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.
https://xonaly.com/vision/
Good luck nonetheless, we need more independent indexes.