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 usually do some test searches using basic terms (e.g., “dog”), and although it doesn’t show many results, the ones it does show are the most logical. I’ve seen links that make me wonder why they don’t appear in other search engines, because they’re really good.
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.