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 doesn't pretend to replace the big search engines — it commodifies them. Google, Bing, Brave and the rest still run on the datacenters they always did; 4got just leans on all of them at once, so no single one holds power over your results. Any engine can drop out, get downranked, or be swapped for another, and your search barely notices. Stripped of their individual grip on you, the engines become fungible inputs — a pool you draw from, not gatekeepers you depend on.
That's step one. The machinery that does the commodifying — a single box with a SQLite database, serving merged results in milliseconds, with an AI research agent running on consumer hardware via Ollama or a cheap API key — is also proof that the orchestration layer needs no datacenter of its own. Step two, someday, is homebrewed indexes that need no external datacenter at all; the friend federation below is already the skeleton for it. Commodify the search engine first. Decentralize it next.
Why
Privacy is a root right. It's the online equivalent of clothing and shelter, and for too long it wasn't automatically provided — we were led astray by corporate interests who made the wild-west feel normal. Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful. A search engine sees everything you wonder about; that's about the most intimate data there is, and no one should be quietly harvesting it. So 4got harvests nothing. No IP. No account. No profile. Your cookie is the only thing that is ever you, and you can throw it away.
But refusing to track you is just the floor. The real idea is to hand you the controls that the big engines keep for themselves. You own your ranking — boost the sources you trust, bury the ones you don't, and export the rules as a goggle to share with a friend the way you'd share a good recipe. You choose where your data lives: your bookmarks and history stay in your browser, or ride with the server, whichever you pick. The engines become fungible. The power comes home to you.
Where this is going
Everything above is shipped and running. What follows is the aim — the north star we're building toward, not a description of today.
Once your bookmarks, your boards, and your ranking profiles are yours to store and yours to share, a search engine stops being a search engine. It becomes a place — a self-hosted web-service run by a webmaster you actually trust, your friend or your family, the way it always should have been. Follow a curator whose taste you like. Share a board of the best links you've found. Stack someone's ranking profile on top of your own. The federation that shares cache today is the same skeleton that will someday share curation — a decentralized, user-owned answer to the walled gardens, where discovery flows between trusted instances instead of through a single opaque tower.
There is also a whole web that search engines cannot see — and a lot of it is the good part. Self-hosted services, a friend's archive on a raw IP, things on odd ports and stranger protocols, pages that never asked to be crawled. 4got aims to make the unindexable shareable: publish a link on your instance — to a group, to everyone, or to friend servers — and instances fold what they've learned into results as a small internal engine of their own, uptime-checked if the owner cares to, marked as special or not, preferred or not, as each user decides. Together with pinlists, this is the quiet answer to slop: discovery curated by real humans who put their names behind it, a web made friendly again.
Further out, I picture people building their own search engines — each one a curated view of the world, a personal algorithm, localhosted and shared if they choose. Lighthouses and looking glasses into the internet, layered into instances like this one as just more engines. Taking back control of your algorithm starts with the search engine. And at scale, that pressure lands exactly where it should: on the advertising machinery and dark patterns of the incumbent engines — the companies that bootstrapped the surveillance state — and on every attempt to dress content suppression up as compliance, or to quietly demonetize speech from the tower.
And it should pay for itself without ever selling you. The plan is to let 4got proxy the paid parts of the internet — search APIs, translation, language models — at cost, funded quietly with Monero. You top up a small balance; the server spends it on your behalf; nobody takes a cut and nobody learns your name. Deliberately small. A little internet — modest by design, so no single node ever grows into the thing we're trying to get away from. Not a platform. A tool your community owns.
This is the long optimism: the winds of change are blowing toward decentralization whether the incumbents like it or not, and the pieces — self-hosting, federation, cheap AI on consumer hardware, private digital cash — are all finally here at once. 4got is one attempt to put them together and hand the result to you.
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
- 15 search categories — web, images, videos, news, music, science, IT, files, maps, social, books, Q&A, packages, weather, lyrics
- 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
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: v0.30.5-0-g96bcf29
- API version: v1
- Engines: 300
- Uptime: 19m
/feed/search?q=your+query).
Source
Written in Go. Licensed under AGPL-3.0. Inspired by 4get and SearXNG.Read the full documentation for detailed setup and configuration.