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!
Thanks! You made my day... nice to get this type of response after 2 years of mostly working in a vacuum :)
Dude this is fucking amazing. Another great example imo:
The answer: The package is in the local warehouse (as in, not still in transit from whatever other state or city) and is awaiting final delivery.
Neosearch: https://neosearch.org/?q=What+does+%22Out+for+delivery%22+mean+on+Etsy%3F The literal first thing is exactly what I'm looking to know. Bingo, right away. But I also get a nice organized list of results if I really am a maniac about delivery terminology.
Startpage (basically google): https://www.startpage.com/do/search?pl=opensearch&t=device&sc=665xzJlcgGieM8M81frOBRrTLcSGlMZztqKrtYtY4PXzpNrRR1rC2XHV4e1WDfWDmrrcwu5PCvbv1hMbH&lui=english&language=english&query=What+does+%22Out+for+delivery%22+mean+on+Etsy%3F&cat=web&fm=70ab7cbd10f407df1f79e683dd6a3dda&fmt=ONMTSIORUTN&sp_grace=1 2 completely irrelevant first results from Reddit and Facebook. 3rd one is the right one but the answer is buried in the article.
Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=What+does+%22Out+for+delivery%22+mean+on+Etsy%3F&iflsig=ABILxe8AAAAAamkSMJqFYh9pvQeswC98HPVB4gunEUUx Does pretty good actually. First highlighted result is what I'm looking for, but the AI overview omits the most important part (the "local" part): "the courier has your package and is in the process of delivering it to you". What the hell is that link though?! More tracking than searching.
Chatgpt: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a6904c6-78c0-83eb-9068-704b9cbe09c6 Answers properly and the first paragraph contains the most important bit, but as always, makes a word salad.
Idk man if this project of yours is financially viable I'm all for it. How much would one user need to pay monthly to pay for their own usage, approximately of course? Is it viable? To me it seems awesome so far.
The best part is you get the results too not just AI hallucinations and made up walls of text. You get links, media, different sections with nice labelling, it's fucking incredible. The very few times I've tried it, it's also been accurate too.