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!
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.
Do you run both Reddit accounts ?