Just came across this while scrolling pixelfed!
A Canadian hosted search engine.
I have been using Ecosia, but will have to try this out.
Looks like it's just yet another searxng instance:
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Buy Canadian
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881 users here now
A community dedicated to buying Canadian products.
Une communauté dédiée à l'achat de produits Canadiens.
Rules:
1. Posts must be related to buying Canadian-made goods and / or using Canadian-owned services
2. Absolutely no bigotry will be tolerated. This includes, but is not limited to, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
3. AI Content Policy
Not allowed: AI-generated images or articles
Tolerated: AI-generated post summaries
4. Only content in French and English is permitted
5. Declare all self-promotion
Users are encouraged to report any content that violates our community guidelines
Règlements :
1. Les poteaux doivent être en lien avec l'achat de produits et / ou de services opérés par des canadiens
2. Aucune bigoterie ne sera tolérée. Ça comprend, mais sans se limiter à, le racisme, le sexisme, l’homophobie, la transphobie, etc.
3. Politique sur le contenu IA
Non permis : Images ou articles générés par l'IA
Toléré : Résumés IA de publications
4. Seul le contenu en français et en anglais n'est toléré
5. Déclarez toute auto-promotion
Les utilisateurs sont encouragés à signaler tout contenu qui ne respecte pas nos directives communautaires
Related communities: Communautés connexes :
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ___
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's worth knowing that SearXNG (Wikipedia) is an open-source metasearch engine that has many available hosts. At the bottom of maapl.net is a link to a list of public instances. maapl.net isn't actually on the list yet, but there's one other Canadian host, https://searxng.shreven.org/. For any non-Canadians who catch this, there's a bunch of other instances you might want to try, e.g. in Europe.
Definitely recommend SearxNG. Been loving using it because I don't need to worry about bullshit results for malvertisements disguised as actual results.
yep. and for the self-hosters it's easy to setup a private instance of it. i fairly recently set one up, and it's been great.
also, mike, who set that up, also runs a smaller Canadian mastodon instance, with about 150 ~~registered~~ monthly active users, so if you're looking for a smaller mastodon instance, that's an option too.
Hi, we actually have 150 monthly active users we have several hundred registered users. We've had thousands of registered users at one time but I purge the rolls every so often.
oops, sorry, fixed! thanks!
Thank you for this awesome comment! I will be saving those 2 instances in my bookmarks.
Looks like 3 of the 5 search back ends are throwing errors at the moment, so it's basically a frontend for Google and Wikipedia for now.
It’s SearXNG
I just added it as my default on my phone to give it a try. First impressions are that search is slow (they say they combine results from multiple search engines so maybe that’s why?) but the few searches I did returned what I expected from any search engine.
Thanks for posting this! I hope it turns out to be a good enough to keep as my default!
It's up as sort of a beta right now so sorry about any performance issues. I'll commit more resources as the use case expands
Welcome! Do you have any concerns regarding amount of people using it vs server costs?
You're welcome!! I am hopeful too.
Use this with Lemmy.ca, Mstdn.ca, Pixelfed.ca, CBC, 1Password, Ground News, Graphene OS, Loops, Pendora.io, Interac.
Tip: You can add a search bar with SearxNG on your Android phone with SearchBar EX
No ads? How do they pay their server fees on a sustainable basis?
SearXNG is pretty lightweight to run, it's mostly run by the same kind of people who host Mastodon and other fediverse instances, often off the same servers. maapl.net is run by Mike Fraser, @[email protected] from the image in OP, where thecanadian.social is his donation-supported, Canadian-focussed Mastodon instance. I don't know whether the funding for maapl.net comes out of that same donation pool, but it would make sense.
It's basically self funded by me for now. I'm pondering at some point maybe doing a membership at like a dollar a month for hosting expenses.
It’s basically self funded by me for now. I’m pondering at some point maybe doing a membership at like a dollar a month for hosting expenses.
Have you thought about applying for a CIRA grant? mstdn.ca did something similar with them back in 2022.
Anyone know how to make this default on Firefox? Keeps saying it had an error connecting.
https://maapl.net/search?q = %s is what I had to put in for the URL for Maapl. (Without the spaces between q, = And %s)
That doesn't seem to work for FF mobile. It's just taking me to the main search page after I put something in the search bar. Am I doing this wrong?
I can't spot the difference and I set it on mobile as well.
You have a Q in there and that solved it. Thank you!
That worked! Thanks!