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Nona – A German Search Engine

175 points| danskeren | 4 years ago |nona.de | reply

96 comments

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[+] lopis|4 years ago|reply
I couldn't find it anywhere in their data statement, nor in their about page or terms and conditions, where the results were coming from. Finally at the bottom of the SERP there's the indication that results come from Microsoft (Bing). However, all links to Bing seem to happen in the backend, including linking to images. Would like to know how much data they share with Bing, but so far as it's visible from the client side it looks pretty solid. And they have podcast search, which is cute.
[+] dathinab|4 years ago|reply
Indexing the web and doing a initial evaluation is hard and costy.

Because of this only a few search engines do so, if we exclude Asia the only starch engines I know which do so are Google, bing and Yandex(?).

All other defer to one of thos search engines (most times bing) while decoupling, post and pre processing queries to a varying degree.

[+] Borrible|4 years ago|reply
And there still is the German meta search engine, MetaGer. I already used it more than 20 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer

https://metager.org/

It also has a TOR hidden service:

http://metagerv65pwclop2rsfzg4jwowpavpwd6grhhlvdgsswvo6ii4ak...

[+] toastercat|4 years ago|reply
I just used this for a few English-language queries and the results... are surprisingly great.
[+] MildlySerious|4 years ago|reply
I like that they offer an ad-free experience for 2€ a month. I would like more of the internet to offer this type of alternative.
[+] throwaway47292|4 years ago|reply
Google makes like 50$ per month from you and Facebook makes 30$ per month (or something in this ballpark), things are way beyond what most people are willing to pay.
[+] alexfringes|4 years ago|reply
Interestingly, this approach seems to be gaining more traction in Germany specifically. One of the larger newspapers, Die Zeit, applies it for the free tier of its website. There’s a big annoying modal when you go to zeit.de if you want to see that approach in practice. Hilariously the choice I make in that modal never seems to stick. Maybe there’s a separate GDPR-compliant toggle somewhere to allow them to track that I want to be tracked ha!
[+] qwertox|4 years ago|reply
What is the relationship between Nona and Chronoto [0]?

Chronoto sells luxury watches, is the same owner, registered at the same address and has the same commercial register entry.

[0] https://www.chronoto.de/impressum/

---

> (1) I agree that Nona Search Technologies GmbH ("Chronoto") may use my e-mail address for advertising Chronoto, including advertising in connection with the sale (e.g. information on the value of the watch and the sales process), the purchase (e.g. interesting offers of watches) and ownership (e.g. offers of insurance and financing, as well as maintenance and repair).

[+] poolie|4 years ago|reply
As it says in the imprint: Chronoto is a showcase for the search (and crawler) technology behind Nona, which we are going to offer next year.

Chronoto doesn't sell watches, it's just a (meta-)search engine.

[+] neathack|4 years ago|reply
It says that Chronoto is a search engine for luxury watches using Nona's search tech.
[+] keewee7|4 years ago|reply
My ideal search engine would be 2008-2012 Google results but filtering out anything that even remotely smells of blog spam containing affiliate links.
[+] achempion|4 years ago|reply
Do you know how to do ranking of that king without pinging anyone to setup your analytics tool and have previous history or searches?
[+] freediver|4 years ago|reply
Curious how much would you be prepared to pay per month for your ideal search engine?
[+] jtagx|4 years ago|reply
Looks like they are using Bing / Microsoft for their search
[+] marban|4 years ago|reply
There's only one chance to make a lasting impression as an aspiring Google competitor and there isn't a single one that even made it into my bookmarks. I understand there's enough love for DDG on HN but life is too short for mediocre horizontal search results.
[+] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply
First thought as a German, why? Second thought, why not? Google killed all others because it was much better. I still use Google because DDG does not work for me, but there might be a market for a German search engine on top of Bing, now that the technology gap isn't as large as it was 20y ago. The benefit of being better for Germans (by whatever definition) could compensate the technology gap.
[+] Minor49er|4 years ago|reply
Compares well against Fireball, another German search engine that also has plenty of results for Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän

https://fireball.de/search?q=Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellscha...

[+] zoomablemind|4 years ago|reply
> Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän

"Danube steamship company captain" per Google Translate, in case anyone else wonders what that beauty of a word-train means in English.

[+] hakanensari|4 years ago|reply
Googling this took me to the electrifyingly long Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.

It seemingly won’t even render properly here, at least on my iPhone.

[+] chespinoza|4 years ago|reply
I wonder what would be better? having search engines able to deal with different languages or having different search engines for every possible language, Don't see the point for the latter to be honest, having an universal language makes more sense to me.
[+] marginalia_nu|4 years ago|reply
Regardless of whether you serve them through the same search box, from a practical standpoint, I think you'd want basically a separate back-end for each language. Stuff like relative term importance, word extraction, ranking, they all benefit from being kept separately.
[+] blondin|4 years ago|reply
different search engines for every language.

it looks like a lot, but a typical user will only use a handful of them. and having each tailored to a language or region is better than a universal search engine.

[+] visarga|4 years ago|reply
First we do search. After retrieval comes question answering based on the retrieved snippets. Then comes multi-hop question answering with the need to correlate information between multiple sources. Just watched a video showing how it can be done https://youtu.be/-ethT5YDVmo?t=1256
[+] the-dude|4 years ago|reply
I searched for Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän and it had plenty of hits.
[+] barbazoo|4 years ago|reply
I thought you spell Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän with 3 "f", i.e. Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän
[+] bravenous|4 years ago|reply
Good quality results on English search, but it logs IP address etc and does not anonymizes users. So I wll stick to DDG till the fix it. Otherwise great initial effort.

Excrept fron ther privacy policy - "Such information may include details of the User’s visit, information about the User’s computer, including IP (Internet Protocol) address, operating system and browser type, the User’s location, and usage information. An individual User will not be identified from or by this information and NONA is entitled to copy, distribute or otherwise use such information without limitation".

[+] poolie|4 years ago|reply
Are you talking about Nona? We don't log any IP addresses.

You might want to put the quote in context: The passage is from the area of "email and marketing" or "social media", we are obliged to the passage if we maintain a presence there - so in the case our Instagram accounts for example.

But thanks, we might need to edit the text to make it clearer.

[+] andrefuchs|4 years ago|reply
Clever name! Anon backwards.
[+] poolie|4 years ago|reply
Hah, you are the first one who got it :)
[+] stanislavb|4 years ago|reply
I dunno, there is something obviously wrong with this engine.

When I search for "saashub", saashub.com isn't on the first page. And that's a website that's been online since 2014 and has more than one million page-views a month... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[+] lopis|4 years ago|reply
Bing doesn't show that website either. Some websites are so eager to block spam that they block any automated traffic with the sole exception of Google's crawler.
[+] phil42|4 years ago|reply
How can this be a privacy-respecting search engine if it requires me to provide payment details for the ad-free version? On top of that, the ad-free version requires a login and enables them to tie my search queries to my account.
[+] freediver|4 years ago|reply
Cool name, good design.. I also like the fact it has podcast search built in. Well done!
[+] tgv|4 years ago|reply
Seems to respect privacy. At least it only includes one external js resource, and doesn't leave cookies. And while the interface is in German, it does find results in various languages.

Edit: I must add that I had my ad blocker on...

[+] throwaway158497|4 years ago|reply
Great effort. As a individual developer, How does using Bing results work? Can I signup for their search engine API and modify them based on my secret sauce, without raking up 100$+ bill every month?
[+] munaf|4 years ago|reply
I love that people keep making alternatives, but I can't shake the feeling that whatever displaces search engines won't be recognizable as a search engine.

(And I have no idea what it's going to be.)

[+] rp1|4 years ago|reply
A search engine could replace a another search engine, but it’d need a better take than just being German. Google wasn’t the first search engine after all.
[+] quaintdev|4 years ago|reply
Feels snappy. I could find some people I know which I was not sure if it would find.

English version of the main interface would have been great. I have added it to my Firefox anyway.