Bruno reached out to me mid-April with a suggestion to check out his privacy-first search engine tool Uruky. Uruky works on a subscription model, but one of my kids and I were able to test it out for free for a couple of months.
I normally do not test privacy tools on request, but rather focus on describing tools I’ve discovered myself and already use in daily life. Yet the email conversation between us evolved into quite a warm exchange about his projects, my blog, networks and privacy tools in general. Bruno, being a software engineer, helped me better understand how local networks work, which led to my article about running a Monero node.
searx.space isn’t blocked because of AI, it’s blocked because it’s violating search engine TOS by scraping free results for other purposes, and the public instances are easy to spot because they’re doing orders of magnitude more searches than is “normal”.
This aggregator is different because it is a paid search engine. You pay a monthly subscription and they use it to pay to access Bing/Google/etc.'s API, then serve that content. This works differently than SearXNG because money.