my review of uruky

02 Jul, 2026

I’ve been using Uruky since the end of May (so for about five weeks now) and I thought I’d do a writeup of my thoughts on the product. As you may know, I used to be a Kagi customer and wrote about my reasons for and against paying for it in December. I had my ethical qualms with it, but was frustrated enough with search that I decided to go for it. However, the improvement of a custom ranking system over standard search was not worth the price tag of roughly €11.50 a month for the unlimited search tier while their $5 tier (that would eventually be €6.40). The features were nice, but not a must-have for me and since my money was going towards their ventures in AI that are actively poisoning search results (ironic that Kagi provide the illness and the cure in one package), I decided to cancel in March. I was not very happy with DuckDuckGo even from an ethical standpoint with their AI ventures as well, but at least that was free and I was contributing to them making a net loss for their negative contribution to society with their AI shit. That was until I read The Privacy Dad’s interview with one of the people behind Uruky which sounded like exactly what I needed. And it was!

Note

Full disclaimer that I’m neither paid nor somehow coerced into writing this review. I paid for this service with my own money and my opinions are mine and mine alone. ⁨I told Bruno Bernardino⁩ (one of two people behind Uruky) that I was going to write a review, but he wasn’t involved in any of this. This disclaimer is important because I will be praising Uruky a lot.

What got me interested was that it was a European meta search engine using mostly EU indices. This is important to me as I believe there should be more index diversity and we should be relying less on big players dictating who gets to be read and who doesn’t. Account creation is based on the Mullvad model of a generated number string and the way payment is handled also sounded really promising. My favorite thing that I noticed as soon as I had entered the settings page was that Uruky wasn’t a subscription and also followed the Mullvad payment model. So continuing to use the service was an active choice I’d be making, with no automatic renewal. This is good for the customer, probably not so much for business in the short term. But happy customers return! Since Uruky lets me export my settings, returning is really easy when the account number is deleted after a few weeks of inactivity (not with topped up accounts, though).

The interface is really minimal and so is the search product. There is regular search that includes a list of links (no widgets, instant answers à la DuckDuckGo/Kagi, and no AI). Every interface item can be shown or hidden in the settings to keep it simple. Then there is the image search which proxies image thumbnails (or all images, but I disabled that because I was frequently going against the whitelist configured by the provider) through Uruky’s servers. Search results come from a variety of configurable sources which by default prefer European indices like EUSP, Marginalia and Mojeek, but can made to show Google-like results with the click of a button. Uruky supports Serper which is a Google proxy from the UK (so not EU, but still European, which doesn’t bother me) which is what I use. What I’m getting now is Google’s search results—not individualized through the profile Google creates on everyone of course—with my own custom ranking. To keep things cheap and „unlimited,“¹ Uruky doesn’t call on every index unless the first ranked index doesn’t return enough results. They explain why and how they do it in their FAQ. What this means is that if I disagree with or dislike an index’s inclusion, I can just remove it from my search experience entirely, which can’t be said about Kagi who refuse to stop using Brave and Yandex or allow their customers to opt out of using them; the same way they make you pay for AI when paying for search. Uruky is intentionally keeping things focused on search, so no AI which is a feature by itself. Welcome to 2026 where the absence of a feature is a feature!

When I began using this service, it was significantly more barebones than now. In the span of five weeks, Bruno implemented everything I was missing and more. All the features I praised in my Kagi post in December sans Lenses are now in Uruky for the meager price of 5€ which is a steal for me. As a student, I have to pay a fee on every non-EU banking transaction so Uruky being Portuguese not only means that the tax is included in the price (!), but that I don’t have to pay a banking fee either, keeping the price as advertised. With US services, they may advertise a €5 price, but with 20% VAT and the €1.13-1.46 banking fee, I’d be sitting at €7.13-7.46 every month. That’s the advantage of going European in my case. Yes, we have better data protection laws, but it’s dubious how effective they are with smaller businesses that haven’t undergone the necessary scrutiny yet. So until they do, I have to take their word on their privacy claims, however, from my extensive discussions with Bruno Bernardino, I’m confident that he is doing his best to provide the most private service possible considering the circumstances of it being a paid service.

Some interesting features that Uruky provides that I haven’t seen elsewhere are labeling/filtering out malicious domains and AI slop, both based on community maintained lists. I have each configured to filter URLs out despite the risk of false positive. I find myself frequently hitting slop now, so it is simply less work for me to have this running in the background than to block offending domains. It also filters out UTM tracking parameters from search results which I don’t quite benefit from with my extension setup, but it’s nice nonetheless. Another thing is that after 12 months of using Uruky, you can download a snapshot of its source code at the time of you hitting 12 months of use that you can then self-host. It’s licensed in a way that doesn’t let you compete with Uruky for a while, which I find to be a very reasonable limitation. If you want to self-host your own meta search engine and SearXNG is not that compelling for you, paying for 12 months of Uruky might be a nice alternative with its broad feature set.

There are things that still annoy me, though. For example, I can’t edit any text input in my preferences. So if I noticed an error in my URL rewrites, I’d have to delete the preference and then write it up correctly. This wouldn’t be as annoying as it is if, and this is the next deficit, Uruky’s settings page wouldn’t load to the closest heading which means a lot of scrolling practice. This is especially annoying when manually adding domains to change their ranking as you can see in the attached video below:

Speaking of domain rerankings, the three-dot menu to edit a result’s ranking does not show up on mobile, so the way the settings page works now becomes even more annoying and cumbersome. I imagine the settings page needs to be redesigned so it uses a sidebar with settings tabs instead of the current chevrons so saving a change doesn’t send me upwards in a list. Aside from the missing three-dot menu that shows up on hover on desktop but doesn’t exist on mobile, the other annoyances only inconvenience me every once in a while, so definitely not that big of a showstopper for me. I would still like this to be handled better, though. A prompt to pick a domain’s ranking preference instead of scrolling to find it and then change it from the default „raise ranking“ preference would go a long way. Likewise, an option to edit instead of delete and recreate would make changing settings a lot nicer in the meantime.

All in all, I’m very satisfied and will continue using and supporting this project as I want it to succeed, since we desperately need(ed) an alternative to Kagi. If you’ve looked at Kagi and the feature set didn’t impress you in light of the price or you disagreed with its politics like I did, I highly recommend you check out Uruky!