Mwmbl - Search
mwmbl.org
The free, open-source and non-profit search engine.

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.

  • taladar
    3·
    2 days ago

    Seems to mostly return Wikipedia results for the first few results for a few terms I tried, even where it has more directly relevant results afterwards.

      • taladar
        1·
        1 day ago

        I can’t really see any cards. Also, it has a lot of random Wikipedia results before the actual websites and even then the top results aren’t great.

        • coldsideofyourpillow@lemmy.cafeOPEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          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.