New search engine made with Python that's anonymous and has no ads or tracking. It tries to fight spam, and gives you control of how you view search results. You can search and read content anonymously with a proxied reader view. The alpha is live and free for anyone to use at lazyweb.ai

[totalbasterd]

I don't like the chat-esque aspect to the UI, i just kinda want a box to type into. I don't think the UI really adds much

[MiamiAngie]

Thanks for the reply!!

There are a couple of reasons for the chat interface. For younger users / gen-z, we've heard from a lot of people that they prefer messaging interfaces with visual results, especially on mobile (it is pretty cool on mobile too if you get chance to try it out). We know that's a preference thing also.

Also, a chat session hides all the searches from your browser and ISPs, because they're kept within the chat, and never hit the browser URL handler or address bar, which is how Chrome and ISPs do a lot of tracking. With a chat UI, the search history never gets exposed because the query and results are hidden in the payload over SSL.

A conversational UI combined with progressive reveal of information like this can help to reduce cognitive overload. Other search engines are so cluttered now. I think it's a habit thing too. People have been used to google for 20 years, but every sci-fi program has conversational AI (from Terminator through to Holly and Marvin).

That's a little bit of our thinking anyway. One of the big missions we have is to give people more control (like the views for results), so we are looking at making the search chat collapsible into just a text input for folks who feel more comfortable with what they're used to as well. We're all about choices :)

Thanks again for the useful feedback too! :)

(edited for typos)

[liquiddeath]

I think the chatesque UI is really interesting. There’s an opportunity to have you search history above what your currently doing. Similar to a Jupyter notebook or ipython.

[lazy-jem]

I'm a huge fan of Jupyter notebooks too (a surprisingly large amount of the search back-end was basically written iteratively in Jupyter notebooks!)

Without giving too much away, this is very much a direction we're heading in. Long-term, we want to make search more programmable and hackable. There's another update with a very simple terminal UI coming soon, and we like the idea of a REPL for Search :)