Show HN: LazyWeb – Conversational search engine that's ad-free and private
Hi HN,<p>We&#x27;re Jed and Angie, and we&#x27;re building LazyWeb (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lazyweb.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lazyweb.ai</a>), a search engine with a simple chat interface that&#x27;s free from ad-tech and tracking. It&#x27;s like messaging a smart friend that answers questions and sends you useful links.<p>I&#x27;m a reluctant expert in how much damage ad-tech has done to media. I&#x27;m a programmer, but I also trained and worked as a journalist and editor, and built a SaaS startup serving media companies. So I&#x27;ve watched first-hand how the media industry has not-so-slowly starved, including seeing friends and customers lose their jobs and businesses. In its place, ad-tech, SEO spam and clickbait have taken over the Internet and dominate search. HN has posts every day about Google search getting worse, and ad-tech more intrusive.<p>We&#x27;re not under any illusions how hard this problem is to fix. But we think we can make a dent in it by building a search application based on ethics and trust, and focused religiously on users, not advertisers. Google is an ad-tech company, not a search company. More people work on ads than search there. We want to deliver results without commercial influence, filter bubbles or censorship.<p>We&#x27;re using APIs rather than trying to duplicate Google. We use NLP models based on transfer learning (GPT-2 for conversation models + some Amazon Lex for routing) to detect utterance intent and extract entities from queries (eg programming, knowledge graph or restaurant searches). We use a combination of routing logic and deep learning models (trained on public search query data) to predict the best sources for that intent &#x2F; entity type &#x2F; topic. Then we query the APIs for those directly (ideally for a direct match), or spider their search-result pages. We have a database of around 15K sites.<p>We rank the results for topic match, content quality etc using models trained on example content. We use a BERT-style approach to extract key information or a direct answer within the top-ranked results. Examples: Computation queries =&gt; Wolfram Alpha or direct calculation. Knowledge graph =&gt; Wikipedia or DuckDuckGo Instant Answers. Programming =&gt; github, stackoverflow etc. Web searches from Bing or other web search APIs are 50%+ of results. We are building some specialized indexes (eg direct navigation). We are &quot;broad but shallow&quot; to start. We&#x27;re in the OpenAI GPT-3 beta and excited to experiment more.<p>We will make money three ways. 1. If a user buys something after searching, we may make a small commission from anonymous referral links. We will share revenue 50&#x2F;50 with content producers used in the search. 2. We will have some paid Pro and Business plans in future. 3. We will provide a chat plugin that businesses can offer for search and navigation on public or internal sites.<p>Try it out and see how the results work for you!<p>Some fun features to try include recent events (try &quot;is elon musk taking dogecoin to the moon&quot;), direct navigation (try &quot;go hn bitcoin&quot; or &quot;go youtube aws lambda&quot;), or question answering (&quot;how many baseballs fit in the moon&quot;). You can also change how results display. Try visual results with feed or card grid views. If (like me) you love HN&#x27;s minimalism, or miss Google circa 1999, try the &quot;Hacker&quot; or &quot;Goggles&quot; view on desktop (top right). Also try Reader Mode for a proxied ad-free experience.<p>LazyWeb is in early alpha testing. It&#x27;s free and open for anyone to use, and improving fast. We&#x27;d love your feedback, suggestions, bugs, improvements and anything else, and we&#x27;re here to answer any questions you have!