Interview with the Engineer of Uruky, a Private Search Engine | Welcome to The Privacy Dad's Blog!

Interview with the Engineer of Uruky, a Private Search Engine

21 May, 2026

This post was last edited 0 minutes ago .

Preamble<br>Bruno reached out to me mid-April with a suggestion to check out his privacy-first search engine tool Uruky. Uruky works on a subscription model, but one of my kids and I were able to test it out for free for a couple of months.

I normally do not test privacy tools on request, but rather focus on describing tools I've discovered myself and already use in daily life. Yet the email conversation between us evolved into quite a warm exchange about his projects, my blog, networks and privacy tools in general. Bruno, being a software engineer, helped me better understand how local networks work, which led to my article about running a Monero node.

The more I learned from Bruno about his project, the more I felt open to the idea of paying for a search engine and supporting a smaller privacy project like Uruky. This is a difficult point for Bruno and his wife, who develop Uruky as a team; the standard response they might get from privacy-minded individuals is 'If DuckDuckGo is free - why would I pay for Uruky?'

With the interview below, I'd like to give Bruno the opportunity to explain his background, what motivates him as a privacy tools engineer, and the Uruky project in his own words. I hope that readers will become interested in Uruky and consider supporting this grass-roots privacy project!

Interview<br>Background

How did your interest in privacy begin?

I have dark secrets...

To be honest, I've always cared a lot about security and freedom, but for privacy, that only truly came to pass around 2016, when I read something somewhere like "everyone knows what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door." That clicked for me because suddenly, I realized that everyone should be allowed to have something private, even if it's not secret; privacy was something different from freedom and security.

Nowadays, if people ask me for a book, I recommend Privacy is Power by Carissa Véliz as a good intro to understanding what it is and why it's important. If I'm asked for a link, I provide "Privacy Matters" by Privacy International.

When people dismiss privacy as not being impactful or relevant, I like to recommend How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa for some examples of terrible things that happened due to the lack of privacy for the people.

What kind of programming background do you have?

I have an older brother who was into computers early (more specifically hardware and networks), so I was exposed to it growing up, but was only really interested in playing online multiplayer games until I reached high school. By then I had to decide what to do and programming felt interesting.

In all honesty, though, I learned most of programming and systems architecture myself (reading books, reading forums and guides online, and downloading open source software and breaking it apart and exploring).

Soon after I started my BSc degree in Network and Computer Science Engineering, I also started my first web hosting business, and eventually switched to a BSc in Multimedia Engineering which I finished a couple of years later (while still running that business, which had become a web agency by then).

In Portugal, actual software engineering wasn't really valued or understood, so I quickly started working remotely with customers in France, Spain, UK, Canada, and US. That's where I acquired most of my skills and knowledge.

Which privacy tools have you worked on or contributed to?

Too many to enumerate, but the most "popular" in the last couple of years are probably Signal, Padloc, Kagi, LibreWolf, and Manjaro . My first contributions to open source software started with the first public versions of Ubuntu, where I contributed with translations and bug reports (mostly debugging and attempting kernel fixes).

For the last few years I've mostly focused on my very own bewCloud, which is a simpler and lightweight Nextcloud alternative.

What motivates you to put your time and energy into developing privacy tools?

Probably just feeling like it's worth having more options to choose from, and some people need them.

With Uruky, I'd also selfishly like to "prove" it's possible to have a sustainable business and make a living by building ethical software with ethical choices and decisions.

Search

Can you tell me a little bit about how search engines work today?

The biggest search engines (like Google and Bing) try to gather as much data as they can from you, so they can sell advertisers ads with "targets" that "convert" very well.1 As a consumer, you don't pay directly with money; you pay cognitively, by having your attention and curiosity sold to the highest bidder.

Some, like DuckDuckGo or Qwant, sell ads to advertisers that are arguably slightly more ethical and "convert" decently enough,...