Fife firm takes on Google with launch of new ad-free search engine

It has no advertising and promises better results for users.

Better Internet Search will launch before Christmas, but goes live from Wednesday, November 18 as part of a fundraiser.

Dr Gordon Povey, the man behind it, of the same name, has developed the advertising-free search engine in collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University and with the support from the European Union’s Next Generation Internet Trust which strives for a fairer more human-centric internet.

It has all the main features you would expect including web and news searches, as well as image and video searches.

Results are delivered in real-time without any ads and it works via laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Dr Povey said he decided to build this product because today’s search engines were no longer serving user’s well.

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He figured that the only way to make search better is to move away from the current ad-based model and focus solely on what the users want from search.

He said, “The consequence of using advertising to generate revenue for search engines is that the user becomes the product to be sold to advertisers.

“If you remove the ads, you can actually solve two problems.

“The user becomes the customer and the results can be based only on what they want without the need for any commercial bias - andyou don’t need to harvest personal data since there are no ads to be targeted and so there are no data-privacy issues.”

He accepts a small start-up taking on the global might of Google is a daunting task,

But added: “We achieved our goal and in many ways the search functions proved to be the easier part.

“The real challenge has been developing the alternative revenue model so that we generate revenue without resorting to ads.”

The search engine has been tested with live beta users over the past two months and final preparations are now being made for the December launch.

Early adopter users are now being invited to register via an Indiegogo campaign.

They can support the operational costs by purchasing search tokens that fund their searches for several months. The first users will have full access to the new search engine before Christmas.

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