Mwmbl: The Open Source Web Search Engine, Because the web deserves better than just one Option.
Table of Content
What is mwmbl?
Today, let’s talk about mwmbl, a scrappy, open-source search engine with a bold mission: to build a better web search, by the people, for the people . No corporate overlords. No tracking. No algorithmic manipulation. Just a clean, transparent search experience, powered by the community, or by people for people.
Think of it as the anti-“big tech” search engine. While Google and Bing dominate with billion-dollar infrastructures, mwmbl is growing from the ground up, fueled by volunteers, open code, and a belief that search shouldn’t be controlled by a few.
And yes, it’s non-profit . Always will be.
Right now, mwmbl has its own independent index, around 500 million unique URLs and 2.5 million searchable results (as of mid-2025). That’s tiny compared to the giants, sure. The quality? Still catching up. It is not pretending to replace Google for everything just yet.
But here’s the vision:
🌍 1 billion URLs indexed by the end of 2025
🚀 Over 10 billion by the end of 2026
What makes mwmbl special is that you help shape it. The community decides how results are ranked. No ads. No paid placements. No secret ranking tricks. Just real people improving real search.
Features
- Simple and easy search, like using Google
- Web Admins and Site owners can add their websites/ domains to be indexed.
- Distributed Crawling System
Crawling
Crawling is powered by the community, while indexing happens centrally on our main server. If you've got extra computing power and bandwidth, you can help by running our command-line crawler with as many threads as possible.
For Firefox users, we offer a browser extension that crawls web pages in the background without accessing your personal data. It receives URLs from our server, extracts page summaries, and sends them back in batches for indexing. Every contribution helps grow the mwmbl index faster and smarter.
License
AGPL-3.0 license
Resources
mwmbl
