Mwmbl is a community-built, non-profit search engine that puts privacy and user control first. It offers a truly different search experienceโone where the results are shaped not by corporate interests but by real people.
Key Features:
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Ad-Free & Privacy-Respecting: No ads, no tracking, and no commercial interestsโjust a search engine built with the users in mind.
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User-Curated Results: Instead of relying on algorithms, search results are refined and tuned by the community.
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Community-Driven Crawling: The engine relies on volunteer-run crawlers. Although the index currently holds around 500 million unique URLs, there's massive potential.
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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.
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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 thatโs where you can make an impact:
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Contribute to the Index:
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Install the Firefox Extension: Once installed, it crawls the web on your behalf.
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Run the CLI Script: An even better option would be to use your spare computing power by running the command line crawler.
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Join the Community: The main community is on Matrix for non-development related discussions.
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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.
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Financial Contributions: Donate some money towards hosting costs and supporting volunteers.
Must be an Android thing, then. They'll probably implement it on desktop in the future.
Also, like I said, the search quality is pretty rough; that's why we need more people to run the crawler extension and/or script. You can also suggest improvements on the Matrix server. Currently, it could use a lot of work.
Ultimately, I believe in the core principle. It's not great right now, but even Wikipedia started out like that. I remember back when Wikipedia was a barebones site lacking content, with a few dedicated editors. Now, however, it is essentially the knowledgebase of humanity.