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.
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.
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.
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.
Good luck nonetheless, we need more independent indexes.
