A New Search Engine That Doesn't Watch You—and Costs Money Instead
A New Search Engine That Doesn't Watch You—and Costs Money Instead
A new search engine called Uruky has launched in Europe, trying something different: it charges users €5 a month instead of free access that comes with tracking and advertising.
How It Makes Money (Without Selling Your Data)
Most search engines are free because they make money by watching what you search for and selling ads based on that information. Uruky flips this around. Instead of tracking you, it just asks you to pay.
For €5 per month, you get unlimited searches. The company says it doesn't track what you look for, doesn't collect data about your behavior, and doesn't show you ads. If you're unhappy, you can get your money back within 14 days.
The service does try to learn your search preferences to give you better results, but it does this without storing your information across different sessions or building a long-term profile on you.
A Code Transparency Promise
Uruky has made an unusual promise: if you pay for a full year, you can see the actual computer code that runs the search engine. This sits somewhere between a fully open service (where anyone can see the code) and a traditional closed service (where you never see it).
This delayed code release serves two purposes. It gives long-term customers a way to check that the service really works the way the company says it does. But it also protects the company during its early days by preventing competitors from immediately copying its approach or finding security vulnerabilities.
For businesses—especially those in healthcare, law, or finance—being able to review the code after 12 months could be valuable. They could verify that the search engine genuinely isn't storing sensitive information. However, organizations that need to check code immediately before using a service won't find this timeline helpful.
No AI, Just Basic Search
Uruky says it has no plans to add artificial intelligence features. Most search engines today are adding AI tools that try to answer questions and summarize information for you.
Uruky's choice to avoid this has a trade-off. On one hand, traditional search results are predictable and don't suffer from the hallucinations—false information—that AI sometimes produces. On the other hand, Uruky is building itself around search as it existed a few years ago, not as the industry is evolving it today.
Why This Matters in Europe Right Now
This kind of service makes more sense in Europe than elsewhere, partly because of regulations like GDPR that restrict how much data companies can collect about you. A service built on "no tracking" automatically complies with many of these rules.
We've seen this pattern before. In the late 2000s, DuckDuckGo emerged as a privacy-focused search engine challenging Google. It succeeded by serving people willing to trade some convenience for privacy, and it eventually grew large enough to matter. Uruky faces a similar opportunity but with a harder challenge: it's asking people to pay, whereas DuckDuckGo was always free.
The Practical Question
If you're thinking about using Uruky, the real question is simple: is privacy worth €5 a month to you? For many people, free services like Google or DuckDuckGo are "good enough." For others—especially those worried about surveillance or working with sensitive information—paying for privacy might make sense.
For businesses, Uruky raises a question about cost versus benefit. €5 per person per month adds up quickly if you're considering it for a large team. And the service would need to work as well as the free alternatives to justify that expense.
The Bigger Challenge
Here's the harder problem Uruky faces: search engines require enormous amounts of computing power and money to keep their results current and useful. Traditionally, advertising-based companies could afford this because they operate at massive scale. Uruky needs to do this while charging a small group of paying customers.
The €5 monthly fee needs to cover not just daily operations, but also the constant work of crawling the web and updating search results. Whether that works out depends on whether enough privacy-conscious users value what Uruky offers enough to sustain it long-term.
