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 must ask because I always ask: why Apache2 and not GPLv3?
Like many devs, this may not be your priority, but GPL protects the users and developers, no?
Yeah, you got it, it's not a priority. The way I understand it is that with Apache2, anyone can pretty much do anything with it. With GPL, any derivative work must also be open sourced under GPL. Which one is better for the open source community is something I have no opinion on, I guess there are good and bad arguments either way. So I just picked for less restrictions, because I don't like restrictions. Also, and I might be wrong about this, but once we're GPL and contributions are added under GPL, it would be an uphill battle to switch to Apache2. But we can switch to GPL quite easily from Apache2 in the future. But yeah, mostly, it's just not something I have a strong opinion about, so I picked Apache2 because it's easy.