We are two passionated young programmers from Austria trying to raise money so we can spend the next few month building Aspinosa - the first web search that doesn't collect your personal data in return to a free service. Aspinosa will be
open source, so that everybody can help to improve the service.
What is the project about?
We believe that privacy is a right everybody deserves. With Aspinosa, we want to offer a alternative to search giants, which make money out of your personal data. Our aim is to get rid of the necessitation of using one of the big players in search industry and to insert privacy awareness into today's web culture.
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Why we are building Aspinosa?
In late 2011 we chatted with some other developers about the alternatives of web search. Our conclusion was, that there are the big players Google, Bing, and Yahoo, of which all are collecting its users' personal data to produce revenue by selling it. As we noticed that there was no search engine that was totally focused on the user's privacy interests we started to think about this topic seriously and finally ended up here with the plea for backing.
Your search - privacy-focused open source search engine - did not return any results.
Why do we need money?
Until now we have a plan, a bunch of ideas and the programming skills to build Aspinosa. What we now need is the time to build this powerful piece of software. We two are ready to spend the rest of this year totally focused on building what will help you to find the right stuff in the right moment without thinking about what personal data your search provider's collecting about you. Once we have built the groundwork of Aspinosa, we're going to release the code as open source so everyone can make it even better. $35,000 buys the service for everyone, forever. We're convinced it can contribute to make the web a more privacy aware place. We will spend the money on some office space, storage for Aspinosa's search index, revision control system. Every single outlay will be documented public so you're always up to date where your money has gone. In return we will give more than a half year to this project in the belief it will - with your help - succeed and enrich web search.
So, if you're interested in a web search that doesn't collect personal data, please spread the word about us. Tell your friends about this project, send your email contacts the link to our social media profiles (Facebook Page, Twitter)
Our promise to you is, that Aspinosa will be aGPL software which will be released until the end of the year.
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What happens if you go over the goal?
The extra money will be put back into the project. For example an image search is one of the addittional features we'd like to implement. The higher it goes the better the project gets.
What happens if you don't meet the goal?
In case we're not able to raise $35,000 we're going to start Aspinosa anyway, presumed we raise at least $10,000. Development will last longer but we'll give our best to launch it this year! Perks will be shipped in any case.
Other Ways you can help.
If you're a passionate developer and want to help coding we'd be glad to hear from you. Just drop a message to office@aspinosa.org.
