Mwmbl is a community-built, non-profit search engine that puts privacy and user control first. It offers a truly different search experience—one where the results are shaped not by corporate interests but by real people.
Key Features:
-
Ad-Free & Privacy-Respecting: No ads, no tracking, and no commercial interests—just a search engine built with the users in mind.
-
User-Curated Results: Instead of relying on algorithms, search results are refined and tuned by the community.
-
Community-Driven Crawling: The engine relies on volunteer-run crawlers. Although the index currently holds around 500 million unique URLs, there's massive potential.
-
Ambitious Growth Goals: mwmbl plans to reach 10 billion unique URLs by the end of 2025 and 100 billion by 2026, at which point it should be a true alternative to commercial search engines.
-
Open-Source: The project is fully open-source, meaning you can contribute to the code and help resolve issues to push the project forward.
How to Get Involved:
Right now, the search quality is pretty rough, but that’s where you can make an impact:
-
Contribute to the Index:
-
Install the Firefox Extension: Once installed, it crawls the web on your behalf.
-
Run the CLI Script: An even better option would be to use your spare computing power by running the command line crawler.
-
-
Join the Community: The main community is on Matrix for non-development related discussions.
-
Code Contributions: Check out the project on Codeberg. You can contribute code, report issues, or suggest new features to help make the search results better.
-
Financial Contributions: Donate some money towards hosting costs and supporting volunteers.
What is the quality like? Is it better than others because of the community ranking? And have you noticed any downsides to it, like speed or having a hard time with niche queries?
I've admitted this in the original post:
Personally, I'm very excited for the project's potential. The quality isn't great, but the idea is promising. I remember back when Wikipedia was lacking, and only upheld by a handful of dedicated editors. Now, however, it is essentially the ultimate database of human knowledge.
It's honestly not really there for daily usage, the results aren't very good. I think that's just because of the small index tho. But the speed is good. It's a really interesting project but there would have to be a lot of people running the crawler for the results to actually be good.