this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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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!

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[–] 64bithero@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I like the idea but it suffers the same issue I see on a lot of engines like this. The results are just a bit too busy. It do a lot for readability to break up the search segments into different sized text.

I’d also on mobile ensure the search bar has some pill outline around it. It took me to long to figure out how to search

[–] bartjellema@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] 64bithero@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

I keep using the search I am impressed it’s so good I am slightly skeptical about tracking.

This will be my daily driver I think …

[–] ImUsuallyMoreClever@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

Just tried it out! Happy with the results, but I agree some UI tweaking could go a long way. Where to type your search, and the results are too "clean" to the point where it's a bit confusing.

Great work!