Search engines are built by armies. Thousands of engineers. Policy teams. Ad sales forces. Revenue optimization squads. The larger the team, the more clearly the incentives crystallize: keep people on the platform, keep ads running, keep the flywheel spinning.
Findborg is built by a few people in Hernando Beach, Florida. That’s not a limitation. That’s a design choice. And it shows up in what we’ve built: a Find Engine made by people who need it to actually work.
Small teams have clean incentives
When you’re a large platform, your first obligation is to the platform. Features get built to drive engagement metrics. Rankings get shaped by what’s good for monetization. You add ads because that’s how you pay for the army.
A small team building something it believes in has different pressure. There’s nowhere to hide. If the results are bad, the team knows immediately. If a feature compromises the integrity of what you built, there’s no committee to diffuse the decision, just the people who have to look at it and decide.
That’s how Verity ended up the way it is. We built a boost mechanism that gave paid TalkTag tiers a ranking advantage. It worked technically. We watched it run, saw what it did to results, and chose the results. Not because we were forced to. Because we’re small enough that the people building it are also the people who use it.
Where it comes from matters
The platform is built in Hernando Beach on the Gulf Coast. That’s not a marketing detail. The colors in the interface come from the landscape: the water, the seagrass, the shallow tidal flats, the way the sun hits at sunset. The product looks like somewhere because it is from somewhere.
Big tech is nowhere. It’s built in offices that could be in any city, serving markets that are everywhere and therefore nowhere in particular. Findborg is specific. It comes from a place. That specificity shows up in how it’s built.
What being small means for the product
It means decisions happen fast. When something is wrong with results, it gets fixed. When a feature doesn’t serve the people using it, it gets cut. There’s no internal politics about whose roadmap owns that problem.
It also means we’re honest about what we don’t know yet. Findborg is in Public Beta. We’re not pretending otherwise. Citizens who are here now are genuinely on the ground floor, not the ground floor of a finished product, but the ground floor of something being built in the open, with the people using it helping shape what it becomes.
What it looked like on day one
When the first user watched a live demo, the spider pulled 174 links in under a minute. He submitted the first TalkTag. He made the first Hive post, asked where to find the best Chinese food in Hernando County. Then he looked up and said: “we are on the ground floor of the next.” He signed up on the spot.
The demo happened in the same room where the platform was built. The person running it was one of the people writing the code. That’s how close the distance is between Findborg and the people using it.
We’re going to keep it that way.
“Is there a search engine built by people who actually care about results more than revenue?”
This post answers: “Who built Findborg and where did it come from?”
