Uruky - The Paid European Search Engine #
About a month ago I setup an account at uruky.com and paid for month of use. This post sums up my first impressions.
But first, what is uruky?
Uruky is a search engine that you pay to use, kinda like Kagi. Now, you might wonder, why not Kagi?
I actually was a Kagi subscriber before, and I really like the quality of their search. But I eventually cancelled my subscription due to a combination of issues:
- They use the russian Yandex service as an underlying provider. As an european, it bothers me to indirectly fund russian companies when Russia is in a way with Ukraine.
- Kagi is an American company. While this isn't necessarily a cause in itself to cancel a subscription, improving my digital sovereignty is always on my mind.
- Their focus is a bit all over the place. Again, not a cause in itself to cancel the subscription, but search is hard, and I'd rather they focus on it rather than making a browser and thinking about e-mail hosting.
Uruky solves all the above points. It's hosted in Europe. It only focuses on plain old search, not AI. It only uses European search providers.
Account creation #
Uruky probably has the easiest account creation I've ever encountered. You click the "Sign up" button and... that's it! You're done. You now have an account number, which is all you need to provide in order to login.
This means Uruky knowns nothing about you except your search preferences and if you're paid up for the month. So it's great on a privacy basis too.
Now, one thing that puzzles me is that I assume the account number will be relatively easy to brute force. But maybe that doesn't matter? There's no personal information there, so all you get to do is mess with someone's settings. Which... is annoying I guess, but also not a big deal?
Anyway, I wouldn't mind being able to set a password on the account, but I'm also not super worried about it.
Customization #
Just like Kagi, Uruky allows you to customize how your search works. You can ban or boost search results from specific pages. You can set a default language and country that your search will be executed in. You can pick which search providers to use, and how results from each should be ranked.
You can also define a couple of fallback search providers, like Google or Ecosia, that will show up as links on the top of every search result. This allows you to very easily compare the search result across providers.
Which is a nice segway to...
Search results #
Is it good?
No. At least not for me.
I used to use Ecosia, and so I tend to compare each Uruky result against it, and I almost always find Ecosia to provide better results. This puzzles me a little, as Uruky does use EUSP, which is the search index created by Ecosia and Qwant.
Uruky is new, though, something that can also be said for EUSP. I can only assume it's going to become better over time. Kagi, for instance, is probably the best search engine I've ever tried, proving that a relatively small team can build better search than Google.
Conclusion #
I like Uruky. I really do.
Their service is very affordable at 5 euro a month, and their interface is great. Unfortunately they fail where it matters most: search results.
They're new, though, and they seem to deliver new features and improvements at a good pace. I'll try them again in a few months or so, and if they quality improves to the point that I'll make them my daily driver, I'll write a new blog post.