Today we released a beta version of Bora Search, a small project that we hope can have a big impact on how people search for content on the web.

The idea

Often in my life, have I been struggling with self-discipline, struggling to oblige myself to follow the behavior I knew (or believed) was best for me. Often have I spent nights thinking of good resolutions, swearing to myself that the next morning I would change for good. And often have I failed to change or to actually take action. A music teacher of mine once said to me : “To succeed, you just need to follow the three ‘P’ rule. Patience, Perseverance and Passion…”. Beautifully put, I must admit, but easier said than done…

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about trying to use various search engines on a regular basis. Coming from the western world, I had been using the same tool for so long (just like more than 90% of people with an internet access worldwide) and I wanted this to change. Several reasons motivated this but it could take long to go over those in details and I don’t necessarily want this to sound too ideological. So to make it short, I would simply say I believe that :

• monopolies are bad,
• privacy is an issue that should be considered seriously,
• “giving” too much power to a private company can be dangerous as shareholders’ interests and common good are rarely aligned.

So I began exploring other options and started by changing the default search engine in my browser settings from time to time. I also tried to use the “for this time” feature (available in some browsers such as Firefox which allows you to use a different search engine “just for this time”. Even though it felt simple and easy in the beginning, I quickly stopped using that feature because I forgot about it or because it’s so much easier not to use it. Also, I ended up switching back the default to my original engine, and with time more or less forgot to switch it back again… Couple of weeks/months later, I realised that I was back to square one, constantly using the same platform again, and felt quite disappointed about myself. I decided to persevere.

As I kept thinking about it, I began to realise that the available mechanisms previously described maybe weren’t the proper answer to my problem. I needed something that could take care of this automatically, without me having to manually change or adjust things constantly. I needed a simple tool that could allow me to set, once, the distribution (between search engines) I wanted, and that would then take care of everything seamlessly. Bora Search was born.

The concept

Bora Search is a web browser extension (only available on Chrome for now, Firefox on the way) that allows the user to easily and automatically distribute queries between the search engines of his choice. How the user distributes and balances queries is entirely up to him/her, and he/she can reallocate everything very easily.

Some choices had to be made for this first release, so for now only 5 (arbitrarily predefined) engines can be used. As this does not reflect the ideas of fairness and neutrality that we value, this will most likely change shortly. By default, each search engine has an equal share, which means that by default each engine will “see” ~20% of all the user’s searches.

The story

So the good resolution was there and the idea had sparked, but the whole thing really started more or less as a joke. I happened to travel quite a bit to Brazil in the past decade, and had the chance, with time, to make some very good friends there. As I was in Rio when the COVID-19 pandemic reached Brazil and the situation became more and more tense, I ended up crashing at my good friend Albert place. Here we are, stuck in an apartment, wondering what we’re going to do on our weekends… Beaches are closing, streets are empty, not much to do… So one day, rebelling against boredom, Albert decides to wake us both up, and goes like this : “Come on, man, let’s do something of our time ! Let’s start something that matters !”. “Well, I might have an idea…” I replied. Funny thing is Albert ended up committing even more code on the project than myself.

What the f*** does “Bora” mean ??

After all that, you might be wondering where the heck this name comes from :-). To put it simply, “Bora” is a brazilian portuguese slang that is the contraction of “Vamos embora”, which means “Let’s go”. As the project came to materialize in Brazil, and because we say this all the time, Albert came up with this name pretty naturally.

Open source

Bora search plugins are licenced under the GNU GPL-v3 terms and available on github. We welcome all new contributors, feel free to join the crew !

We’ve been working hard on this project for the past several weeks, in our free time. We hope Bora Search can find its public. We hope some people, other than us both, can find some interests in using it and, doing so, that they’ll enjoy the ride.

Laurent & Albert