Whize: A private curated search experience.
Other search engines serve stale results more often than not and what is considered relevant changes much quicker than search has traditionally been able to keep up with. Other search engines also treat user data poorly. We believe that informed consent, transparency, access to what has been collected, and explicit opt-ins for collection forms a minimum for how any site should interact with their users.
Whize combines a custom ranking method with curated indexes to serve more relevant results that aim to keep up with what constitutes “relevant” for a given topic over time. We serve our own indexes which at the time of writing this article represent over 100M pages and 40K unique websites. At launch, we have 3 platforms, Arxiv, Reddit, and Wikipedia (Stackexchange on the way) and 2 categories, Gaming and Everything Else (our general index). We plan to differentiate each vertical index over time with new features specific to that index. We also recognize that other single vertical search engines have a difficult time getting traffic to their results and in the next year, we plan to open an API and vetting process that will allow those vertical sites to integrate with and list themselves on our site alongside our indexes.
We’re sure that everyone also wants to know how we intend to monetize ourselves. We don’t think people will find much surprise in the answer which is advertising. We think there’s a better, much less creepy way to do ads and, as we stated earlier, we believe that this interaction needs to be as respectful of the user’s privacy as possible. As we work towards implementing our monetization setup, we will be getting as much feedback as possible from users to meet that goal. We also know that some people absolutely hate ads and we will have something for you that allows you to use our site without ads while still recognizing and respecting that we are a business and need to keep the lights on. We’re working on what form that will take, but we’ve considered things such as https://scroll.com/ , classical subscriptions, and onetime payments that will disable ads for a logged-in account for some duration of time.
We believe that search has stagnated for too long and that the existing way users are treated on the web is not right. We are hopping into the arena to provide a better way.
— Nick and Ian
