Search’s dominant player, Google, has been resting on an increasingly ad-ridden and SEO page rank model for far too long—and now sees disruption bubbling on the horizon by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, fuelled by Microsoft's gargantuan investment. AI search (it seems) has arrived through the peculiar modality of a chat window. However, in the rush to 'chatbot' everything, we believe a fundamental reality about how people find and explore information has been overlooked. With this flaw in mind, we have been developing an ambitious project that aims to transform the way people interact with search.

The approach for this project was like any other design engagement: diving deep into customers, use cases, and context - then carefully examining human behaviours related to search and information gathering, the search market ecosystem, technical infrastructure, and other related domains. This comprehensive analysis identified key interventions and opportunities, paving the way for a fresh and disruptive take on online search – and pinpointing areas where our product can make a massive impact for users.

In parallel, we‘ve been designing, experimenting, and building proof-of-concept experiments that demonstrate our unique take on search and information gathering. Our team has found a way to integrate generative AI that feels like part of a broader cohesive search experience, instead of something simply bolted on to legacy page-rank text-field.

We are excited about the potential of this phase of machine intelligence adoption, and the almost-daily groundbreaking announcements that come with it. Our goal is to someday reshape the world of online search and to push the boundaries of user interaction and information gathering, with a little help from generative AI.

As such, this project is currently in stealth mode as we continue to refine and develop the experience and underlying technology.