Artado Search (Search Engine)

Hello! I’ve been working on Artado Search for a while now. The project began in 2020, but this year, I completely rewrote the whole thing.

Artado Search is an open-source and private search engine. What makes Artado Search stand out is its focus on privacy and customizable features. You can use its own results (Artado’s results are still in testing) and results from other search engines via Artado. Additionally, you’re free to personalize the homepage background and logo as you prefer, choose between light and dark themes, rearrange search categories, or utilize themes, extensions, and logos made by our users from our store!

One of Artado Search’s most notable innovations is its extended customization options. We introduced the concept of “ricing” to the web. You can craft your own themes using CSS codes, create your own extensions with Javascript codes, and share the themes, extensions, and logos you’ve made in our store.

Thanks to Artado’s powerful “Profiles” feature, you can save and share the customizations you’ve crafted with other users. Moreover, by syncing your Artado account with “Profiles,” you can access everything across all your devices.

Artado Search distinguishes itself from other search engines through features like being open-source, having its own store for themes and extensions, providing its own forum, showing results from various search engines, and being the most customizable search engine. Personalize your search experience and protect your privacy with Artado Search. To become a part of the Artado family, simply head over to artadosearch.com!

Please note that this word has negative connotations.

Artado protects your privacy as much as possible.

Then why aren’t you hosting assets yourself? Why are you fetching them from fonts.gstatic.com, code.jquery.com, cdn.jsdelivr.net, and cdnjs.cloudflare.com?

server: Microsoft-IIS/10.0
x-powered-by ASP.NET
x-powered-by-plesk PleskWin

Seriously? You’re hosting it on Windows and using a proprietary server manager?

x-aspnet-version 4.0.30319

If this is correct, this is a decade old insecure .NET version.

syncing your Artado account

Oh yay, an account so you can trivially attribute all searches ever to a person.

made by our users from our store!

This sounds more like XSS as a service.
What assurances do you have in-place to prevent abuse from malicious user generated content?

Commits · Artado-Project/artadosearch · GitHub

All of these are squashed commits/dumps. This makes it difficult for outsiders to see what is actually changed and also makes it harder for others to contribute.

https://github.com/Artado-Project/artadosearch/blob/ca8bbb4dff548eaa21b7e2d39013f2c9531eeff9/LICENSE
GPL

IANAL, but this may be in violation of the .NET license. Someone else needs to confirm this.

8 Likes

Yikes…

2 Likes

Minimum Requirements

  • Must not collect personally identifiable information per their privacy policy.
  • Must not allow users to create an account with them.

You are right. I will fix that.

No, it is not. We use .NET Framework 4.8.

We do not collect searches at all. We have no idea who searched what. We only save the data of what language you use Artado with and the search source(Google, Bing etc.) you use. We mostly use these datas to improve our translations. These datas are completely anonymous.

Sorry for that. I will be more careful in the future.

I don’t think so. There many other ASPNET projects licensed under GPL/AGPL.

We do not collect any personally identifiable information. Accounts are rarely used in Artado Search. You do not have to create a account to use any functionality in Artado. Only place its used is for syncning profiles.

@ardatdev
please address the use of Windows and Plesk as well as the security concerns with ugc.

access everything
We do not collect searches at all.

these statements directly conflict.

may I also ask why you switched from AGPL to GPL? In the context of a network service, use of GPL allows you to host something completely different and publish potentially unrelated source code. Whereas AGPL requires you to publish the source code for what users are truly accessing.

edit: sorry for the edits

1 Like

Artado is coded in ASPNET. Thats why Artado is hosted in a Windows server. But I don’t think thats create a too much of a privacy concerns.

There is a misunderstanding. With “everything” I meant the customization settings. You can see the datas we collect from here. And also a example of what the collected data:
resim
As you can see there is no identifiable information.

When you mentioned I noticed that I made a mistake in licensing. Artado was licensed under AGPL since March 3 2022, you can check from older commits. But with the new update I licensed it under GPL by mistake. I just fixed that.

The commit i was talking about: Create LICENSE · Artado-Project/artadosearch@492c6ad · GitHub

And also profiles are stored like this:


The userid is not a real userid but a example. If you create a profile without a account it looks like this. If sync with your account the userid changes with the your accounts id. I meant these with “everything”. Sorry for misunderstanding, I should have choose my words more wisely.

Sorry, I didn’t see that. All the themes and extensions are moderated. We look and test the code. If there is anything malicious, it won’t get approved. Also all the themes and extensions must be open source.

I disagree with the use of Windows for hosting, but I appreciate your timely responses. Thank you.

2 Likes

I am trying to be transparent as I can. I am not a someone who is trying to fool people. I am a 16 year old, high school student and this my hobby project for the last +3 years. Artado is not a company. I am just some kid who is trying to make a good project that makes internet a better place. I am not trying to earn money from that (at least right now, one day I might need money). Privacy Guides suggest people projects like DuckDuckGo, Startpage etc. They are proprietary software and they both had some privacy issues too. Artado is open source and I think its deserves a chance.

1 Like

You are welcome and thank you for showing my mistakes. I will try to fix them as far as I can.

1 Like

I think its deserves a chance.

Yes!
Please don’t take my criticism negatively.

Some other low hanging fruit you can easily do:

It should also be noted somewhere that the search is performed client side.
As in both you and Google still directly learns what people search.

2 Likes

I will look up them in morning.

The client-side results are because of Google’s API but I removed almost all the trackers and degoogled API as far as I can. Artado still doesn’t save any of the searches. If you are using results from other search engines they might know what you searched but it still mostly anonymized. And I am also working on server-side Google results. I mentioned that in the last post in Artado Forum.

I understand, but this is minimum criteria to be recommended on Privacy Guides. It shouldn’t be possible to create an account.

Will Artado be recommended if we disable the account feature? I was already thinking to remove it because, it’s incomplete and has problems.

You should ask Privacy Guides @team.

I use Brave Search because it has its own results instead of just getting them from another search engine. If you manage to have your own results too, then your search engine would be on another level instead of being yet another search engine that’s just basically a proxy.

Oh, sorry. I thought you were part of the team.

Artado will have its own results in a few days! And in a few weeks it will be the primary source of results instead of Google. Other search engines results will still stay but primarly we will use our own results.

1 Like

I have updated the Artado. I removed the account feature and added Artado results. Artado results are not default right now. But they will be in the future. Also you can find a few cool Artado customization from here or here.

3 Likes