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  • Hacker News
  • Look up online wishlist. An online tool that people will not find, because the results are articles instead of products in that category. Look up dreamlist. You won’t find it either, even though it is another private tool that lets families and gift drives create collaborative lists for disaster recovery and the holidays. Small search engines need to realize Google has an advantage with chrome because it counts duration of stay on sites, instead of just content and can tell if something is a tool (people spend more time on those).
    by dzink
  • I tought it was about to say "Canada's independent AI chatbot". Seeing that it is instead an old-fashioned search engine made me smile.
    by Muhammad523
  • Nice project. The little weather info in the footer is a neat touch. Is that pulling live data, or is it just based on a fixed location/demo value?
    by Avery29
  • I wouldn’t call that a modern search engine based on the results
    by dmix
  • 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.

    by jekhdkwedwe
  • 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

    by KomoD
  • 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?
    by rpearcea
  • For being such a small index, it's sooo slow to search
    by KomoD
  • 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.
    by Tiberium
  • 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.
    by tamimio
  • Funny, it sounds like “where is?” (zài nǎlǐ?) in Mandarin.
    by reassess_blind
  • Nice. Submitted a few sites to bolster the "small hand-made personal sites" quotient a bit (all made by Canadian ppl fwiw) :)
    by amatecha
  • 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?
    by Lyngbakr
  • 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?

    by cosmic_quanta
  • Via professional access to their infrastructure via its API

    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.

    by tiago-dot-dev
  • 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.

    by Tiberium
  • 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.
    by wunderlotus
  • Just tried marginalia-search.com, It's pretty awesome. Feels homemade, for human.
    by dekdrop
  • 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.

    by tejohnso
  • 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.
    by andy99