What is cl0q?
cl0q is a free, independent search engine — and it's going open source soon. Instead of reselling another search engine's results, cl0q runs its own crawler and its own index, adding 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
Our own crawlers continuously fetch and parse pages from across the web — politely, at most one request per second to any server — pulling titles, descriptions, links and metadata. How our bots behave →
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). Our crawlers 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.
Run a crawler (early access)
Today cl0q's own crawlers build the whole index. We're opening a contributor program so others can run a crawler node and add pages to the shared index. It's in early access, and we set each node up by hand.
Want to help keep the open web searchable? Email us and we'll get you started:
Email us: cl0qsearch@gmail.com