“I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that’s what I am trying to build,” the founder of Stract said.
I will say I’m pretty glad to see a search engine which actually is not just a meta search engine. I wish Kagi would attempt this rather than partnerning with Brave.
One thing I find odd though is why these engines trying to make their own index don’t do the adversarial strategy that Brave Search has done : while using other indexes, collect what people actually click on and use it in your own index. I will note that I do not support Brave.
To save reading the paywalled article, the site is at https://stract.com
I’ve only done a single search but it gave me a summary at the top, and some discussion forums in a different format. I’m impressed so far!
It’s a free account, like the one you made so you can write your comment. I’d hardly call it paywalled.
Tbh I just saw it needed a login and scrolled back up to the link without reading further, so was obviously a bit hasty in my assessment of it being a paywall.
For anyone wondering about how they’ll eventually address financial sustainability if Stract takes off:
Stract is currently not monetized in any way, but its website says it will eventually have contextual ads tied to specific search terms but that it will not track its users, which is similar to the system DuckDuckGo uses. Stract also plans on offering ad-free searches to paying subscribers.
I’d pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search. I bet a more straightforward approach is more energy efficient as well. In the meanwhile the big tech are running a gazillion processes on our data to suck every bit of wealth they can out of our existence through their free (in it’s littlest sense) products.
I’d pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search.
You might, but not enough people would to make it sustainable. Neeva was really well loved but couldn’t make the math work.
I’d pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search.
Haven’t tested it yet, but have seen it mentioned several times here on Lemmy:
Kagi is a meta search engine though. They just do calls to Google, Yandex, Brave, etc. cut the ad rot and sprinkle some secret spice on top.
EDIT: source, https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
