About Idarus
Idarus was a small, home-made search engine that ran from 2009 to 2012 on free web space at lima-city, where it was introduced in the forum as “die etwas andere Suchmaschine”, the slightly different search engine. The name is an homage to Ikarus (Icarus), with a “d” in place of the “k”. That is why the “d” has always been the special letter in the logo.
Back then, every site was submitted by hand and searched in a MySQL table called Idarus using LIKE '%…%'. Idarus 2.0 is the relaunch, and it finds pages on its own:
Crawler: written in Rust and massively parallel. Hundreds of concurrent fetches spread across hosts, while it still respects robots.txt and waits between requests to the same host.
Index: Tantivy, an inverted index with BM25 scoring and memory-mapped segments. It runs inside the search process, so there is no database server.
Ranking: text relevance × content quality × site reputation. Word soup, AI slop and scam pages without a reputation are locked out of the results entirely.
Website: React rendered on the server and styled with a home-made UI framework. No external CSS is loaded, and the only JavaScript is a 2 KB script for search suggestions (as in 2010); search works without it.
The original 2010 logo, recovered from the Internet Archive. The new logo keeps its idea: the “d” stands apart from the other letters, now as a red outline whose stem is cut upward like a wing.
