UWEC CERCA 2026

Being closed source and controlling over 90% of the world's search engine market, existing mainstream search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo have an overt influence on the way users interact with the open internet. Due to the size and complexity of the internet and its standards, it is difficult to build any sort of complete internet search engine. This project aims to fill that gap, making a complete, open source, and index-independent search engine for use with the modern web. Using Kubernetes, Postgresql, and custom Python code, high-performance web crawlers are deployed at scale across a fleet of 12 retired desktops repurposed to be servers and tokenized into a high-performance database which matches user queries to the closest matching site. Insights about the modern web, including the prevalence of AI-generated content and the distribution of languages are also measured using the data captured during this project.