Unfiltered
An open source, privacy-first search engine for war & conflict journalism. No ads, no tracking, no algorithmic bias. Built with Python, Flask & TF-IDF.
Unfiltered — Open Source War & Conflict Search Engine
Unfiltered is a privacy-first, open source search engine built entirely from scratch — no external APIs, no third-party search services, no data collection.
The Problem
Google buries war and conflict journalism behind ads, SEO manipulation, and algorithmic bias. Independent frontline reporting from sources like Bellingcat, The Intercept, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, and Human Rights Watch gets drowned out by sponsored content.
The Solution
Unfiltered crawls, indexes, and searches independent war and conflict journalism using a custom-built TF-IDF search engine written in pure Python. Every component — the web crawler, the indexer, the search algorithm, and the UI — was built from scratch without any external search APIs.
How It Works
Custom web crawler respects robots.txt and crawls 20+ independent journalism sources
TF-IDF inverted index built in pure Python with weighted title and description scoring
Flask backend serves search results with zero logging, zero cookies, zero tracking
Newspaper-style frontend with navigation, sidebar, and privacy audit modal
Privacy Guarantees
No query logs. No cookies. No IP storage. No user profiles. Every search runs in memory and is immediately discarded — nothing to subpoena.
Tech Stack
Python
Flask
BeautifulSoup4
TF-IDF
HTML/CSS/JS
Key Feature
No API