Hi HN,
A short excerpt from our documentation to explain what we're building...
We believe that finding high quality information on the open internet has become increasingly hard. Many have noticed this trend but a superior alternative remains elusive.
Search engines are mostly used for head queries, (simple that many people often look up) but make most of their revenue on tail queries (complex research queries with high financial or life decision stakes).
People build the habit of their default search engine based mostly on the head, and to be good at the head, you need lots of data on what people like clicking through to, thus making the market leader's position even stronger.
But tail queries, often the most important queries users make, are declining in quality because
1. The organic results cannot be much better than the ads, otherwise too much revenue is lost.
2. Publisher revenue is getting smaller relative to search engines', so larger publishers often make more money by affiliate selling to expensive products (e.g. review sites) or by paywall-blocking content.
3. Large publishers win out in search results over authentic user generated content because people click on familiar brands and because they can spend more on SEO budgets.
We don't think it's easy to make an alternative search engine that's much better, but we do think that there are clever ways to use existing search engines to get to the best content.
Hence we built this as an extension, and also made sure to open source it to keep our incentives as honest as possible.
I also published an accompanying blog post 2 weeks ago https://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives . Hopefully this is just the first step and with feedback from the community we can make it more useful in the future.
