Just came across this while scrolling pixelfed!
A Canadian hosted search engine.
I have been using Ecosia, but will have to try this out.
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Looks like it’s just yet another searxng instance:
Tip: You can add a search bar with SearxNG on your Android phone with SearchBar EX
It’s worth knowing that SearXNG (Wikipedia) is an open-source metasearch engine that has many available hosts. At the bottom of maapl.net is a link to a list of public instances. maapl.net isn’t actually on the list yet, but there’s one other Canadian host, https://searxng.shreven.org/. For any non-Canadians who catch this, there’s a bunch of other instances you might want to try, e.g. in Europe.
Definitely recommend SearxNG. Been loving using it because I don’t need to worry about bullshit results for malvertisements disguised as actual results.
yep. and for the self-hosters it’s easy to setup a private instance of it. i fairly recently set one up, and it’s been great.
also, mike, who set that up, also runs a smaller Canadian mastodon instance, with about 150
registeredmonthly active users, so if you’re looking for a smaller mastodon instance, that’s an option too.Hi, we actually have 150 monthly active users we have several hundred registered users. We’ve had thousands of registered users at one time but I purge the rolls every so often.
It’s SearXNG
Use this with Lemmy.ca, Mstdn.ca, Pixelfed.ca, CBC, 1Password, Ground News, Graphene OS, Loops, Pendora.io, Interac.
Anyone know how to make this default on Firefox? Keeps saying it had an error connecting.
https://maapl.net/search? = %s is what I had to put in for the URL for Maapl. (Without the spaces between ?, = And %s)
No ads? How do they pay their server fees on a sustainable basis?
SearXNG is pretty lightweight to run, it’s mostly run by the same kind of people who host Mastodon and other fediverse instances, often off the same servers. maapl.net is run by Mike Fraser, @[email protected] from the image in OP, where thecanadian.social is his donation-supported, Canadian-focussed Mastodon instance. I don’t know whether the funding for maapl.net comes out of that same donation pool, but it would make sense.
It’s basically self funded by me for now. I’m pondering at some point maybe doing a membership at like a dollar a month for hosting expenses.
It’s basically self funded by me for now. I’m pondering at some point maybe doing a membership at like a dollar a month for hosting expenses.
Have you thought about applying for a CIRA grant? mstdn.ca did something similar with them back in 2022.
I just added it as my default on my phone to give it a try. First impressions are that search is slow (they say they combine results from multiple search engines so maybe that’s why?) but the few searches I did returned what I expected from any search engine.
Thanks for posting this! I hope it turns out to be a good enough to keep as my default!
It’s up as sort of a beta right now so sorry about any performance issues. I’ll commit more resources as the use case expands
Welcome! Do you have any concerns regarding amount of people using it vs server costs?
