What is this?
4got is a marketplace for questions and hypertext answers. It fans out your query to hundreds of search engines simultaneously, merges the results, and strips away all the tracking. Over 50 oracle types give instant answers for weather, stocks, crypto, dictionary, recipes, flights, and more — before a single engine even responds. An AI research agent can synthesize deeper answers from real sources. No ads. No accounts. No JavaScript required for core functionality.4got is proof that you don't need big data centers to build a search engine. It runs on a single machine with a SQLite database, serves results in milliseconds, and the AI research agent runs on consumer hardware via Ollama or through a cheap API key. If search — the thing that supposedly requires the most infrastructure on the internet — can run on a box under your desk, what else doesn't need a data center?
How it works
Your search query goes to all configured engines at once using Go's goroutine model. Results come back, get deduplicated and scored by cross-engine consensus — results that multiple engines agree on float to the top. Engine weights, position decay, and intent-based boosts (code, academic, images) shape the final ranking. The engine timeline shows exactly which engines responded and how long they took.
Before the engines even respond, oracles check if your query matches a known pattern — a calculation, a unit conversion, a stock ticker, a weather lookup — and return an instant answer right in the result page. If you search the same query twice, the AI research agent activates and synthesizes a comprehensive answer by fetching and reading the top result URLs.
Friend instances share cached results over a federation protocol. Before fanning out to upstream engines, 4got checks local cache, then friend caches. This minimizes upstream load across the network and means popular queries are often answered without touching an external engine at all.
Privacy
- No IP logging
- No user accounts or profiles
- No tracking cookies — settings are the only cookies, and only non-default values are stored
- Image proxy prevents tracking pixels from reaching you
- Privacy badges on every result: ToS;DR grades and tracker detection show you who's tracking what before you click
- Result URLs from walled-garden sites (YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, etc.) are automatically rewritten to privacy-friendly alternatives (Invidious, Teddit, Nitter, etc.) — configurable in settings
- Proof-of-work auth for returning visitors; no third-party CAPTCHAs
- Tracking parameters are stripped from all result URLs
Features
- 50+ oracle types — instant answers for weather, stocks, crypto, currency conversion, dictionary, thesaurus, calculator, unit conversion, timezone, base conversion, color preview, package versions (npm/pip), DNS lookups, WHOIS, IP geolocation, SSL certificates, CIDR subnets, JWT decoding, cron expressions, DOI resolver, air quality, earthquakes, flight tracking, recipes, radio stations, sports scores, inflation/purchasing power, corporate ownership (SEC EDGAR + GLEIF), Wikipedia infobox, QR codes, UUID generation, password generation, roman numerals, chmod calculator, date arithmetic, hash/base64, unix timestamps, speed test, and more
- AI research agent — a tool-using LLM that fetches top search result URLs, reads them, and synthesizes a comprehensive answer with citations, streaming findings in real time
- Visual search with Lens — image upload, OCR text extraction, QR code detection, region selection for reverse image search
- Federation — peer cache sharing, service proxying (translation, Wolfram, autocomplete), and instance discovery between friend instances
- Privacy badges — ToS;DR grades and WhoTracksMe tracker detection on every search result
- 15 search categories — web, images, videos, news, music, science, IT, files, maps, social, books, Q&A, packages, weather, lyrics
- Hostname rewriting — YouTube to Invidious, Reddit to Teddit, Twitter to Nitter, and more — fully configurable
- Bang redirects —
!g,!w,!ddgand hundreds more for instant engine-specific search - RSS/Atom feeds — subscribe to any search query as an RSS feed, or subscribe to server news via Atom
- Deluxe mode — some engines (Google, Qwant, Yandex) need a real browser; deluxe mode routes through a Playwright backend
- SSH interface — search from the terminal via SSH
- No accounts, no tracking, no ads
Oracles
Oracles are instant-answer modules that fire before any search engine is queried. If your query matches a known pattern — "weather in tokyo", "$AAPL", "define ephemeral", "5 miles in km", "who owns instagram" — the oracle returns an answer immediately in a card above the search results. Over 50 oracle types cover everything from calculator and unit conversion to live stock quotes, cryptocurrency prices, flight tracking, recipe search, and earthquake monitoring.
Corporate ownership queries ("who owns X", "parent company of X") use SEC EDGAR (the US Securities and Exchange Commission filing database) and GLEIF (the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation registry) to trace parent companies, subsidiaries, and shareholder relationships — all from free public APIs with no API key required.
AI research
The AI research agent activates when you search the same query twice (or click the Research button). It uses a tool-calling LLM to fetch and read the top search result URLs, extract key findings, and synthesize a comprehensive answer with citations. The agent streams its progress in real time via Server-Sent Events — you see intermediate findings as they're discovered.
The agent runs in a sandboxed Lua environment with tools for HTTP fetching, JSON parsing, and context management. It works with any OpenAI-compatible API provider (Cerebras, OpenRouter, Ollama for local inference, or any custom endpoint). The operator's metaprompt.md controls the agent's personality and behavior.
How is this different from 4get?
4get queries one engine per request — it's a search proxy. 4got is a true metasearch engine: it queries all engines simultaneously, deduplicates results, and ranks them by cross-engine consensus. Same idea, fundamentally different architecture.
4got also has: federation between friend instances, 50+ instant-answer oracles, an AI research agent, visual search, privacy badges on every result, 15 search categories, proof-of-work auth, per-user API keys, hostname rewriting, RSS feeds, an SSH interface, Lua plugins, and a full REST API. The codebase is a complete rewrite in Go.
Set as default search engine
On Firefox and other Gecko based browsers
To set this as your default search engine on Firefox, right click the URL bar and select Add "4got". Then, visit about:preferences#search and select 4got in the dropdown menu.
On Chromium and Blink based browsers
Click the 3 superpositioned dots at the top right of the screen and click on Settings, then search for default search engine, or visit chrome://settings/searchEngines.
Once you're there, click the pencil on the last entry under "Search engines" (it's probably DuckDuckGo). Once you do that, a popup will appear. Populate it with the following information:
| Field | Value |
| Search engine | 4got |
| Shortcut | 4got |
| URL with %s in place of query | https://4got.alexs.space/search?q=%s |
Once that's done, click Save. Then, on the right handside of the newly created entry, open the dropdown menu and select Make default.
This server
- Version: v0.1.0-3-ge7b99cf
- API version: v1
- Engines: 278
- Uptime: 12d 7h
/feed/search?q=your+query).