How Findborg Works
The Short Version
Findborg has no ads.
Not “fewer ads.” Not “less intrusive ads.” No ads. Nothing you see in Findborg results is there because someone paid to put it there.
The business model is TalkTags and Dimes. A business lists in the Directory for free, and pays Dimes for what its listing can show and for the spider that indexes its site. It does not pay for placement. It does not pay to rank higher. A free listing with genuine community trust will outrank a fully enhanced listing that nobody clicks. That is not a footnote — it is how the system is built.
If you have a question about any of this, the rest of this page explains it in plain language.
How Rankings Actually Work
Findborg uses a scoring system called Verity.
Every listing in the Directory starts at Verity 50. That is the baseline for every business, regardless of what they spend. A Findborg Plus member with a fully enhanced listing starts at 50. A business that has never spent a Dime starts at 50. No legacy advantage. No founding-member head start. No payment that moves the needle at launch.
- Community votes
- Engagement
- Click-through rate
- Impressions
- Signal graph activity
- Payment
From that baseline, Verity moves based on five signals:
- Community Votes
- Citizens of Findborg can vote a listing up or down. Direct endorsement or skepticism from real people.
- Engagement
- How much time searchers actually spend with a listing. A result that gets clicked and immediately abandoned is not a result people found useful.
- Click-Through Rate
- Whether people who see a result actually choose it.
- Impressions
- How often a listing surfaces in relevant results over time.
- Signal Graph Activity
- The broader pattern of how a listing moves through the Findborg ecosystem.
What moves Verity: real people finding a listing useful. What does not move Verity: payment.
Dimes unlock presentation features. More FAQ panels. Video embeds. Maps and contact info. A hero banner. An analytics dashboard. These features make a listing richer and more useful to someone who finds it. They do not touch the score. They do not affect where a listing appears.
A free listing with real community trust outranks a fully enhanced listing nobody clicks. That is not a policy exception. That is how Verity works.
We Built a Ranking Boost. We Removed It.
This part matters, so we are going to say it plainly.
Early in Findborg’s development, we built and tested a mechanism that gave paid TalkTag subscribers a Verity score boost. The idea was that paying for a subscription showed some level of commitment to the platform — a light signal of legitimacy.
We ran the test. We watched what happened.
Paid listings held the top of search results with a dominance that was immediately recognizable for what it was: ads with different branding. The results looked like the results we were built to replace. So we removed it.
Not quietly. Not because we got caught. Because watching it run made the problem visible, and we chose the results over the revenue signal.
There is no Verity boost in Findborg today. There will not be one. If payment ever influenced ranking, Findborg would stop being Findborg.
We are telling you this because we think you should know it. And because the best answer to “how do I know you’re not just doing what everyone else does” is: we tried it, saw what it did, and said no.
What TalkTags Actually Are
TalkTags are the phrases that make a listing findable inside Findborg’s Directory.
The Directory is Findborg’s owned index — businesses, services, publishers, and content that has been submitted and indexed for the Find Engine. It is separate from web search results. When you search on Findborg, the Directory tab shows you submitted listings. The Web tab shows you the open web. Both live side by side.
A TalkTag is a 158-character natural-language phrase that describes what a business or listing is, in the words a searcher would actually use. It is how Borg (Findborg’s AI) finds the right listings for a query. It is how The Hive community connects searches to real businesses.
A listing in the Directory is free. Dimes pay for presentation features and for spider access — Findborg’s web crawler that finds and indexes content from the business’s site. Findborg Plus, the one subscription, keeps a wallet stocked with Dimes. None of it pays for a ranking position.
To put it one more way: you can pay to be findable. You cannot pay to be first.
The Hive
The Hive is Findborg’s community layer. Citizens post questions, share knowledge, and discuss businesses and topics in their own words. Hive activity feeds into Verity. A business that people genuinely talk about and recommend in the Hive benefits from that activity — not because Findborg is manually adjusting anything, but because real community engagement is one of the signals Verity reads.
The Hive is not monitored for gaming. But gaming it does not work the way people might assume. Manufactured votes and manufactured engagement look different from organic activity at the signal-graph level. It is not a perfect system. No system is. But it is a system built around the assumption that real is better than fake, and designed to reward real.
Questions
Is there any way to pay for a higher ranking on Findborg?
No. Dimes unlock presentation features. They do not affect Verity score or ranking position.
What happens if someone tries to game the Verity system?
Gamed signals look different from organic signals. The system is designed to detect manipulation patterns. We also rely on Citizens to flag suspicious activity. It is not foolproof, but the incentive structure is pointed in the right direction.
Can a business bribe the Findborg team to rank higher?
No. Verity scores are determined by the system, not by a person who can be influenced. There is no manual ranking lever for a business to buy access to.
If Findborg has no ads, how does it make money?
Dimes and Findborg Plus. Free listings exist. Dimes buy a richer listing, spider access, and presentation features, and Findborg Plus, the only subscription at $19.99 a month, keeps a wallet stocked with them. None of it buys ranking.
What is Borg?
Borg is Findborg’s AI layer. Activate it with “Hey Borg” on any search. It handles deep research, synthesis, and query breakdown. Borg surfaces listings from the Directory and results from the open web. TalkTags influence what Borg sees in the Directory, but ranking within what Borg surfaces is still Verity-governed.
Findborg is called a Find Engine because it is built around finding, not selling. That is the commitment. This page is how we keep it visible.