Sia is a search engine I built.

Unlike other search engines it does not crawl the Internet and tries to index as much as possible. Instead it only indexes the sites you 'bookmark'.

The idea behind that is that there is a lot of trash and slop out there. But there still is a small web with indie blogs and people who really know their stuff and write about it. Those sites arent that prominent on the mainstream engines (they probably don't do good SEO and stuff) but if you know about them you can add them to your Sia account and index them that way. The motivation behind this approach is that if one of the blogs you 'bookmark' does have an entry about the topic you are interested in it will probably be of very high quality (you verified the source by adding the blog).

If you follow people you can combine the results of the search on your bookmarks and their bookmarks. That way you can establish a 'web of trust' in which you trust people to not add slop to their list of bookmarks. This also acts as a natural mean of discovering new blogs and topics.

Sia was the god of wisom in ancient Egypt. The Logo is the name in hieroglyphs.

An administrator has to invite you via an invitation token.

Sia is open source. It is licenced under the EUPLv1.2 and written in rust. It uses maud as a templating tool and htmx and oat to build the frontend. The actual heavy lifting (indexing and quering) is done by tantivy.