I've spent the past two years building NeoSearch with a simple premise: search got bad not because the web got worse, but because the incentives did. Ads, profiling, and SEO all pull results away from what I actually wanted.
NeoSearch is my attempt to fix that. It's private by design (no cookies, no IP logging, no profiles, no ads), and it uses AI to improve results rather than replace them: independent sources get ranked above affiliate listicles, titles and snippets are rewritten to say what a page actually is, duplicate results get merged into one enriched entry, and "Lenses" let you flip between meanings — search "eagles" and choose the band or the football team.
Currently it takes the top results from Google's index as raw material, then re-ranks, rewrites, and enriches them so heavily that Google's #20 result can land at #1. That's stage one, to prove the experience.
Stage two is crawling the parts of the web mainstream engines ignore.
The end goal is an open, distributed search index anyone can build their own engine on. I don't want to be the next Google, I want search to stop needing one.
As of this week the whole thing is open source (Apache 2.0) on GitHub, so you can audit it or run your own.
It's free, I'm funding it personally, and there will never be ads. I'd genuinely love your feedback — especially the searches where it does worse than Google. Those are the ones I learn from. Ask me anything!
I swapped to it on my phone browser to give it a try. So far I’m liking it. Reminds me when Google used to be good.
I wonder if there’s a way to rank fully LLM generated websites lower than ones with content written by a person.
This is certainly the goal. I've started crawling and analyzing about 16M domains and I'm planning to take screenshots of all to have AI analyze what it actually looks like. Does it have a lot of ads and other crap or is it clean and easy to navigate, etc. And also to analyze the content to see if it looks like useful original content or AI slop. The great thing about being small is that everybody is optimizing for Google, not for NeoSearch. The idea is to ditch the traditional SEO pagerank, etc way of ranking because now we have AI that can actually read and understand the content, so it can determine the quality and how well it matches searches, etc. Anyway, early days, but this is the goal for sure. I'm sooo sick of almost all Google results coming from the same 100 big platforms.