Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

6/28/2026 at 11:21:10 PM

The search engine does indeed seem to be fully custom - the results for niche topics are quite bad, but that at least means it's not a Bing frontend, so it's forgivable. Although I wonder why the authors decided to go 100% custom instead of (partially?) reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine.

On an unrelated note: why do some people use LLMs to write all the text in their projects? As an example: https://xonaly.com/how-it-works - it's obvious that the text here is LLM-written, but I genuinely don't understand why. It's one of the pages linked directly from the home page, so it's quite important. At least personally, I always get very suspicious of any project that doesn't even bother to have some human-written content. (I know the whole website clearly looks LLM-authored, but I feel like it's not hard to add some human touch)

Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs myself quite a lot, but I try to always interact with others in my own words. In rare cases where I need to paste some output from an LLM, I always leave a note about it being AI-written.

Oh, and another funny tidbit I just found: https://xonaly.com/is-xonaly-legit/ repeats the same facts a lot. Ctrl+F "Canad", "independent": 10 results, "search engine": 17 results.

by Tiberium

6/28/2026 at 11:58:02 PM

I wondered if the whole thing was just a vibe coded weekend project. It’s hard to gauge the seriousness and level of effort but without some evidence to the contrary I’m guessing it’s all LLM generated.

by andy99

6/29/2026 at 12:52:44 AM

I’m also curious how OP came about this? No comments on the post, two comments on HN, most history are submissions that are almost all [dead]

by losteric

6/28/2026 at 11:52:03 PM

The text seems like it's there as a basic low effort placeholder.

Maybe it's still a one person project and they don't want to spend their time crafting reasonable marketing fluff pages, so they relied on an LLM to generate that while they focus on the tech side of things.

by tejohnso

6/29/2026 at 12:02:30 AM

It could be true, but the more I look into it, the more I feel like it's not very genuine. For example, https://xonaly.com/privacy-policy/ has a very strong no third party claim, yet the actual xonaly.com homepage calls the Open-Meteo API for weather data from the user browser.

by Tiberium

6/29/2026 at 1:17:06 AM

I remember how google.stanford.edu was a project by two guys, with a lot of makeshift bits. Its search quality was so much higher than of then-incumbents though, it wasn't even funny. Hence the market share growth.

I wonder if this project has a killer feature.

by nine_k

6/29/2026 at 6:25:35 AM

Just tried marginalia-search.com, It's pretty awesome. Feels homemade, for human.

by dekdrop

6/29/2026 at 1:52:00 AM

This type of stuff just screams, “please do not use me” to me. It seems lazy and full of shortcuts on the surface, even if it might not be in reality. And im very pro AI. I’m just also very anti AI slop and regurgitated outputs.

by wunderlotus

6/28/2026 at 11:15:54 PM

Something I couldn't find info about is how this is funded, given that it is ad free and doesn't sell user data. Is it supported by a nonprofit organisation or just paid for out of the developer's pocket?

by Lyngbakr

6/28/2026 at 11:48:12 PM

Via professional access to their infrastructure via its API

https://xonaly.com/ethical-private-search-engine/

How is Xonaly sustained? Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.

by tiago-dot-dev

6/28/2026 at 11:27:32 PM

This is a critical piece of information to convince me to switch to this.

I'm quite interested though!

Also, what's the context of "Built in Canada"? What's the point of mentioning this? Should I expect the results to be better for Canadian content?

by cosmic_quanta

6/28/2026 at 11:31:48 PM

I’d guess because Canadians often rely on American tech infrastructure by default, and current events are shining a light on the vulnerability inherent in that arrangement. It’s a line that speaks to a potential Canadian user base who doesn’t make a distinction among what’s tangled up in their web use.

by mwillis

6/28/2026 at 11:46:20 PM

It seems like it is funded by creator for now. It seems like they intend to fund it via professional acesa to its infrastructure.

Here is the bit that talks about it

https://xonaly.com/ethical-private-search-engine/

> How is Xonaly sustained? > Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.

by tiago-dot-dev

6/28/2026 at 11:32:42 PM

This is the founder: https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/

I guess he’s psyched about being Canadian? Anyway, nothing about funding. The privacy-first stance is certainly welcome.

by cgh

6/29/2026 at 12:50:32 AM

The Google matches for this name are inconsistent and suspicious. Did the LLM just pick a random name?

by losteric

6/28/2026 at 11:49:44 PM

launching this on Canada Day (July 1) would be pretty cool

by audreyfei

6/29/2026 at 4:26:33 AM

Building a "Canadian equivalent" of something else is a great way to get money from the Canadian government right now.

In addition to direct subsidies/grants, the government has a buy Canadian mandate.

by jjmarr

6/29/2026 at 12:53:21 AM

> Built in Canada

It’s a trend now to decouple from US, so much hype about it but I don’t think it will materialize in reality.

by tamimio

6/28/2026 at 11:27:14 PM

Nice. Submitted a few sites to bolster the "small hand-made personal sites" quotient a bit (all made by Canadian ppl fwiw) :)

by amatecha

6/28/2026 at 11:29:46 PM

Funny, it sounds like “where is?” (zài nǎlǐ?) in Mandarin.

by reassess_blind

6/29/2026 at 12:08:03 AM

Interesting, but 1.3 million pages is somewhat limited. They seem to have done a good job indexing Wikipedia. I'm curious, why not scan the full ipv4 address space and index the main page of every website you find?

by rpearcea

6/29/2026 at 12:18:31 AM

You won't be able to scan most of websites this way because most servers expect you to also pass a valid hostname. However you can use domain lists, for example https://purecrawl.com/en/download/domains (or https://domains-monitor.com/ which is paid but has more domains) as an initial seed shouldn't be too bad, but you'll have to ingest terabytes of spammy/low quality content.

by Tiberium

6/29/2026 at 12:54:05 AM

wouldn't certificate transparency logs be a good way to collect most active domains?

by Brybry

6/29/2026 at 2:26:48 AM

Yeah, I forgot about these :)

by Tiberium

6/29/2026 at 12:48:14 AM

For being such a small index, it's sooo slow to search

by KomoD

6/29/2026 at 12:48:40 AM

Probably experiencing the HN hug

by slater

6/29/2026 at 3:04:18 AM

Nice project. The little weather info in the footer is a neat touch. Is that pulling live data, or is it just based on a fixed location/demo value?

by Avery29

6/29/2026 at 3:07:05 AM

Look up online wishlist. An online tool that people will not find, because the results are articles instead of products in that category. Look up dreamlist. You won’t find it either, even though it is another private tool that lets families and gift drives create collaborative lists for disaster recovery and the holidays. Small search engines need to realize Google has an advantage with chrome because it counts duration of stay on sites, instead of just content and can tell if something is a tool (people spend more time on those).

by dzink

6/29/2026 at 12:29:12 AM

I wouldn’t call that a modern search engine based on the results

by dmix

6/28/2026 at 11:28:31 PM

I tought it was about to say "Canada's independent AI chatbot". Seeing that it is instead an old-fashioned search engine made me smile.

by Muhammad523

6/29/2026 at 5:20:36 AM

I couldn't find anything. It seems to be independent of search results.

by dizhn

6/29/2026 at 12:52:54 AM

Is this connected to Jonathan Bouchard (https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/) who was connected to some shady crypto investment business?

Not sure if same person.

https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/02/28/hyperion-ai-int...

https://lautorite.qc.ca/grand-public/salle-de-presse/actuali...

The search engine itself seems to be written in PHP, the status page (https://xonaly.com/vision/) looks like it is static and has a standard "generated by LLMs" layout and style. None of the status updates are real. It is just javascript animations.

They claim their bot has a Xonaly user agent. However this User Agent does not seem to appear in any of the Bot/UA monitoring sites. I am going to call BS on this and say they do not have a bot at all.

I searched for something basic and it only gave me to exact hits from Wikipedia and IMDB. Nothing else.

On https://xonaly.com/help/ and https://xonaly.com/is-xonaly-legit/ they explain multiple times that it is indeed legit. Why would you need to explain that this project is legit and not a scam. This is a huge red flag to me.

It is connected to n0c.com .. does anyone know what that is?

It says hosted in Canada but the IP space is registered by RIPE, which is european.

Everything about this gives me a weird feeling that this is not a serious project.

I think it is all fake ... or maybe simply a lot less what it claims to be.

by jekhdkwedwe

6/29/2026 at 12:59:04 AM

I agree it looks LLM-generated and not so serious.

> This seems to be connected to Jonathan Bouchard (https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/) who was connected to some shady crypto investment business.

I looked into it, and I'm not convinced it's the same guy. The Xonaly Jonathan looks much older than the fraud Jonathan.

> It is connected to n0c.com .. does anyone know what that is?

Those are the whitelabel nameservers for his hosting provider, PlanetHoster

by KomoD

6/29/2026 at 1:04:04 AM

I changed it to something that is more a question than a finding. I am not sure at this point.

by jekhdkwedwe

6/29/2026 at 12:05:55 AM

It can't find any major event happened in Canada in the last 10 days.

by betaby

6/29/2026 at 12:11:45 AM

Yeah it needs a lot work…

by MichaelZuo

6/28/2026 at 11:46:07 PM

7 years since `:prefers-color-scheme` became widely supported.

by kps

6/29/2026 at 1:41:57 AM

This was almost certainly posted by the author, who has made several new accounts which are active in the comments. It also appears to be completely vibe coded, perhaps even created and posted without the author even knowing about it. It's possible all of this is done via open claw.

by slopinthebag

6/29/2026 at 12:51:27 AM

It lacks, a lot, also the icon resembles the x org. I know in Canada now there’s the trend of “sovereign” data or whatever, but who are we kidding? I know plenty of critical infrastructure org and they rely 95% on US based cloud products, from operation to security, so that sovereign whatever isn’t happening any time soon.

by tamimio

6/29/2026 at 12:49:03 AM

Searched “New super girl movie “ and got results for super Mario bros

by grandinquistor

6/29/2026 at 1:37:32 AM

Once again, an indie software project provides an abject lesson on why naming is important.

The name "Xonaly" is difficult for English speakers to pronounce and difficult to remember (because it's a nonsense word) and so it will not spread by word of mouth.

Unfortunately, as much as I think it's important for Canada to reduce reliance on/integration with the USA, this project is DOA until it can find a better name.

by stackghost

6/29/2026 at 12:20:06 AM

The index depth just isn't there and at the rate you're crawling you won't catch up to google's ocean cooled datacenter

https://xonaly.com/vision/

Good luck nonetheless, we need more independent indexes.

by vedmed

6/29/2026 at 6:22:21 AM

[dead]

by dekdrop

6/29/2026 at 12:28:00 AM

[flagged]

by CurbStomper

6/29/2026 at 12:54:25 AM

[flagged]

by sourcegrift

6/29/2026 at 5:31:07 AM

[flagged]

by coldbreeze

6/29/2026 at 12:08:14 PM

[flagged]

by remopulcini