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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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