bartjellema

joined 4 days ago
[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Also, this is not us. Looks indeed like a brand new account. Probably karma farming or something. https://www.reddit.com/r/foss/comments/1v97ge5/neosearch_is_now_open_source/

Also, I totally support being a bit cynical these days... trust me, in the process of building NeoSearch and finding out how many things really work, I've also become very cynical. This is partially why I didn't promote NeoSearch for the last 2 years. It was nice to just have a handful of users. As an example, I was looking into adding movie showtimes. Turns out that movie showtimes is a multi-million dollar business where theaters sell their showtimes (yes, you read that correctly, they SELL their movie schedule that is publicly listed on their website) to data brokers and to get access you need to pay those data brokers. One of too many examples.

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

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.

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

You're the second person asking for this today, so this will be an option soon.

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I'm not sure what you're talking about here, these are our Reddit accounts: https://www.reddit.com/user/BartJellema/ (11 year old account) https://www.reddit.com/user/PhillSebben/ (5 year old account)

There are some other things out there called NeoSearch, maybe that tripped you up? And yes, I'm the only developer so far. It's been open source for 2 days!

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Thanks you, that's good feedback. This puts theme support higher on the todo list.

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thanks! You made my day... nice to get this type of response after 2 years of mostly working in a vacuum :)

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Hard to notice when you first use NeoSearch, but at the top there are "Lenses". There are more results hiding in those. But most of the time, what you're looking for will be in the first lens.

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)
  1. Yeah, for sure. I actually just found out about it yesterday. I've tried contacting the founder to see if I can include some of those search results into the mix. In fact, just added it in the code so it will go live next time I update.
  2. Yeah, good call. This is probably best added with a plugin. There are APIs out there that provide this data, so I can at least start with that to provide the streaming services that show the series or movie in your country. I've just open sourced the code and first focus will be to make it easier for others to install and run the code so that anyone can add these kind of extensions. They can even be vibe coded pretty easily because the task is pretty constrained. This has actually been very much my focus during development, to add a lot of extensibility that is structured in a way that AI can semi automatically write hundreds of plugins.

Thanks for the feedback!

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

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.

 

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!