The Last Wire. We’re Cutting It.
SnipeSearch started in a garage in Luton in 2005, on salvaged server hardware bought for a hundred pounds, running software from a magazine cover disc. No tracking. No behavioural profiling. No advertising surveillance. That was the point from day one, before privacy was a marketing angle, before it was a debate. It was just the right way to build a search engine.
From SES to Sphider to our own custom stack, we have always moved toward more control, not less. snipesearch.info runs on our direct index. snipesearch.asia runs federated search via the YaCy peer-to-peer network. snipesearch.com draws on both. And the meta search in Mark 4,pulled from Google and Bing (while preserving your privacy) as supplementary meta sources alongside our own index, a short-lived, pragmatic arrangement while our own indexes grew to the coverage required. That arrangement served its purpose. It is done.
Mark 5 replaces the Mark 4 index on snipesearch.com with a local index large enough to need nothing from Google or Bing. The original plan gave us three years to get there. Then the rest of the industry lost the plot.
Google forced AI-generated summaries into results. DuckDuckGo deepened its AI integration. Bing has effectively been an AI product for some time. Even Ecosia followed. One after another, search engines that positioned themselves as alternatives started handing users machine-generated text instead of actual results.
We moved the timeline. Three years became three months.
What’s Already Cut
As mark 5 rolls out in stages, we have already removed every other third-party dependency from the stack. These are live today.
Video: YouTube is gone
Video search no longer touches the YouTube API. It now runs entirely through snipesearch.video ,our own video platform, launched in 2026, and the PeerTube federated network. Results stay in the ecosystem. Watch links route through snipesearch.video. None of it goes near Google’s infrastructure.
Image and sound: human signals, not algorithms
Image and sound search are now live on snipesearch.com, built on human curation and interaction data. No machine learning models trained on scraped content. No black boxes. The way search is supposed to work.
What’s Coming: Mark 5
Web search results on snipesearch.com are the one remaining place where the meta relationship with Google and Bing persists. Mark 5 ends that. When it lands, the .com joins .info and .asia as fully self-stack. No third-party index feeds, no external dependencies for web search, no relationships we didn’t choose and can’t walk away from. Within three months.
On AI Search
We will say it plainly: AI-generated search results are not search results. They are a summary of what a model was trained on, presented in a format designed to stop you clicking through to the actual web. That is bad for users who want accurate, current, source-linked information. It is bad for publishers, journalists, businesses, and creators whose content trains these models and is then used to replace the traffic they depend on. It is bad for the open web.
SnipeSearch will not go that direction. We started because two people in Luton looked at what search was becoming in 2004 and decided to build something different. The reason has not changed. The answer has not changed either.
Glass Eye and the Webmaster Dashboard
The Glass Eye verified business cards surfaced directly in search results (part of mark 5), is already live in the webmaster dashboard. Businesses filling in their Glass Eye contact card and social profiles now are building their presence ahead of the full rollout.
The dashboard also handles index submission across our full network, including YaCy, up to 2,000 independent federated search engines from a single submission. If you want your site found on a search engine that is not going to bury it under generated content, this is where you start.
snipesearch.com (search without the noise) .
support at support.snipesearch.co.uk
— Snipe Group Limited
