What is cl0q?
cl0q is a free, independent search engine — and it's going open source soon. Instead of running on one company's servers, cl0q is powered by a distributed network of crawlers that together index thousands of new websites every day.
Our goal: 100 million sites in the index. Use it right here on cl0q.com today — and once the code is published you'll be able to read every line and run your own copy. No lock-in, no fees, no black box.
How the engine works
cl0q turns the open web into searchable results in three stages — and your query never gets stored along the way.
Crawl
A network of community-run crawlers continuously fetches and parses pages from across the web, pulling titles, descriptions, links and metadata.
Index
Those pages are normalized, enriched with DNS & network data, and stored in a full-text index ranked for relevance.
Search
You type a query and get ranked results in milliseconds — handled in memory and immediately discarded.
We don't log your searches
Privacy is the default, not an upsell. Searching needs no account, sets no cookies, and keeps no search history (accounts are optional, passkey-only, and only for community features). We rely on our network of crawlers to gather the index ahead of time, so answering your query never requires storing it.
- Queries are processed in memory and then discarded — never written to a database.
- No profiles, no behavioral ad targeting, no cross-site tracking.
- We're going open source soon, so you'll be able to audit these claims yourself.
Join the crawler network
cl0q's index is only as strong as the network behind it. We rely on a community of crawlers — run by people like you — to discover and refresh the thousands of sites we index each day. The more crawlers, the broader and fresher the search.
Want to help keep the open web searchable? Run a crawler and contribute pages to the shared index. Come say hi and get set up:
Join our Discord