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mwmbl - the user-curated search engine (mwmbl.org)

submitted 2 days ago by coldsideofyourpillow@lemmy.cafe to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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.

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[–] some@programming.dev 1 points 19 hours ago

I'm really interested in the concept.

I would like to see community-oriented search engines. But I don't know if "the community" is viable really. It would better be for communies. I just downloaded the browser extension and it lets you see the pages it is crawling; they are the sorts of things that would be of interest to a lemmy type community--- a lot of nerd stuff. Which is of interest to me. That's why I'm here. :)

What if I am in an online community interested in a different part of the web--- say celebrity gossip and royal watching. A network of forums, comment sections, socials, chats etc with thousands of people who are at least casually interested and some hundred who are very motivated. Like everyone else the web is getting harder for us to navigate. How realistic would it be for us to spin up an instance of this to make our own community search engine? This community does not want to see a bunch of stackoverflow, gihubs, arxiv papers, tech news or the other stuff I am seeing float past me in the crawling extension.

It seems that the place where this kind of thing is somewhat documented would be https://book.mwmbl.org/

but it's pretty vague.

[–] techconsulnerd@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Seems like a promising concept as real alternative to Google/Bing.

Initially I couldn't figure out how to spell it and this doesn't help to grow the branding. Apparently it's pronounced "mumble", so I recommend they just renamed it to mumble for better brand recognition. It's way easier to spread the word.

[–] some@programming.dev 1 points 19 hours ago

mumble is already the name of FLOSS voip software so they're probably better off with the existing name. Which I don't love on first glance but there's probably some rationale for it.

[–] Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's a cool project. I always install the crawler extension on every browser I use.

[–] mlflexer@lemm.ee 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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?

[–] coldsideofyourpillow@lemmy.cafe 11 points 2 days ago

I've admitted this in the original post:

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.

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.

[–] Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 days ago

Crawling with 3600 threads!

I can't do much to help but I can certainly donate processor cycles!

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 1 points 1 day ago

@coldsideofyourpillow Any idea how to get in touch with their support team or something? I created an account a few hours ago, and I still haven't received the confirmation email.