Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

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.

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?

Nice. Submitted a few sites to bolster the "small hand-made personal sites" quotient a bit (all made by Canadian ppl fwiw) :)

Funny, it sounds like “where is?” (zài nǎlǐ?) in Mandarin.

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.

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?

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.

I wouldn’t call that a modern search engine based on the results

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?

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.

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).

I couldn't find anything. It seems to be independent of search results.

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.

I searched for René Descartes. I got results with Renewable in title a few.

It can't find any major event happened in Canada in the last 10 days.

7 years since `:prefers-color-scheme` became widely supported.

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.

The index depth just isn't there and at the rate you're crawling you won't catch up to google's ocean cooled datacenter

https://xonaly.com/vision/

Good luck nonetheless, we need more independent indexes.

Searched “New super girl movie “ and got results for super Mario bros