Personal apps vol 41237
Deploying a personal search frontend for privacy focused searching
October 10, 2026
Another morning spent building a new personal app with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Sharing this here in hopes it inspires your next personal app :)
Introducing evulSearch - a very lightweight frontend for different search engines: Currently Brave Search + Kagi Search + Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo via BrightData, SerpAPI, SearchAPI, or SearXNG. Data is optionally cached locally, but the idea is that we are minimizing what is sent/collected by the search engines by handling it server side*. More backends to come!
There are some basic server side configurations for the various optional backend APIs, and a client side config widget with settings stored in the users browser. Both Brave and the various scrapers have free tiers for development/personal use, and we can rotate between those intelligently. SearXNG is a fully self hosted scraper meta search engine. Kagi is pay as you go.
The Brave Places API is pretty great, and the whole thing looks good on mobile.
I am also loving this pattern of basic web app -> served over Wireguard (Tailscale or OpenVPN will work just as well!) -> iPhone "website app" - for personal apps where you dont need real deployment its so quick and easy. Happy hacking!
* If you don't have a paid zero-retention plan with the API providers assume your data there is not private. SearXNG is a good way to access Google/Bing/etc for better privacy if the API providers are a concern.