Developer builds privacy-focused search engine Slick with independent web indexing

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A developer has built Slick, an independent search engine designed to give users more control over how they search the web without being tracked. The project grew from a personal experiment into a deep technical undertaking involving web crawling, indexing via Elasticsearch, and machine learning-based ranking. Slick currently defaults to DuckDuckGo's index while its own independent index matures, and uses a combination of traditional BM25 keyword matching and semantic search to improve result relevance. The developer noted that infrastructure — including crawling, storage, and ranking — proved far more complex than the user interface. Slick is still under active development, with ongoing work on index growth, ranking quality, and expanded customization options.

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