Anti-EnshittificationPledge
Never Betray the User
They took search — the thing that was supposed to connect humanity to its own knowledge — and turned it into a slot machine. They filled it with ads, stole from the people who make the web worth visiting, and then pasted a hallucinating AI on top and called it progress. Cory Doctorow named the disease. We're building the cure.
What We Will Never Do
We will never sell your data.
Your searches are yours. Not ours to auction. Not a revenue stream. Not a "personalization opportunity." We don't build behavioral profiles. We don't track you across the web. We don't sell your attention to the highest bidder. That entire business model is a betrayal, and we refuse to participate in it. Privacy isn't a premium feature we'll gate behind a subscription someday. It's a constraint we build around, from day one, permanently.
We will never steal traffic from creators.
When you search, you're looking for someone else's work. A journalist who spent weeks on a story. A blogger who actually knows what they're talking about. A small business that built something real. Our job is to connect you to them — not to scrape their content, summarize it into a box, and keep you on our page. Every result is a doorway, not a dead end. We don't do knowledge panels. We don't do AI overviews. We do links — the thing the web was built on.
We will never index AI-generated slop.
The web is drowning. Millions of pages generated by machines to game search rankings, written by nothing, for no one, about everything. Fake product reviews. Fake news sites. Fake recipe blogs. Fake mushroom foraging guides that could literally kill you. We actively detect and filter this garbage out of our index. You came here for human knowledge, human expertise, human voices. That's what you'll get.
We will never let ads corrupt search.
Yes, we run ads. We're honest about that — it's how we keep the lights on. But our ads will never track you, and they will never come before search quality. This isn't a hypothetical risk. Google had the best search engine on earth and deliberately made it worse because degraded results meant more ad clicks meant more revenue. They chose money over you. We'd rather go broke than do that. Ads are clearly labeled, contextual only, and the search results you see are ranked by relevance — not by who paid the most.
We will never enshittify.
No bait-and-switch. No paywalling features that were free. No inserting "sponsored" results disguised as organic ones. No degrading the experience to juice quarterly earnings. The product gets better over time, or we've failed. That's not a slogan — it's the only acceptable outcome. The moment we start optimizing for our shareholders instead of our users is the moment we become the thing we set out to replace.
Enforcement
This isn't marketing copy. These commitments are structurally binding. If Argand is ever acquired, merged, or handed to new leadership, these pledges travel with it — they are non-negotiable conditions of the company's existence. Any future leader who violates this pledge is not "pivoting" or "evolving the business." They are destroying it. And we will build the legal and organizational framework to make sure that's exactly what happens. If Argand can't exist without enshittifying, then Argand should not exist. We would rather shut down, open-source everything, and walk away than become another name on the timeline below.
Why I Built This
I grew up with a search engine that just worked. You typed what you wanted, you found it. That's gone now — buried under ads, scraped into AI summaries, gamed by SEO farms. I built Argand alone because I got angry enough to stop complaining and start building.
I'm a socialist. I believe technology should serve people, not extract from them. Argand needs money to run — servers cost money, bandwidth costs money — and we'll make that money honestly, through ads that don't track you and services worth paying for. But I don't need all the money in the world. I need enough to keep the lights on and pay the people who help build this. That's it.
I'm not in this to get rich. I'm in this because search used to work and now it doesn't, and the people who broke it did it on purpose, for profit, knowing exactly what they were destroying. I want to kill and dethrone Google — not to become the next Google, but to prove that the new global standard should be "products that actually work correctly."
How We Got Here
The Betrayal Timeline
This isn't ancient history. This is a documented record of promises broken, trust violated, and users exploited — by the companies that control the internet. Every entry is sourced. None of this is disputed.
This timeline is unfortunately not comprehensive — there are far too many betrayals to fit on one page. But it showcases the clear, undeniable pattern of abuse.
Twenty-eight years. Dozens of companies. Billions of users.
The same pattern every single time.
Be good → get big → extract everything → repeat.
We are building the exit.
Try the alternative.
Search that respects you, rewards creators, and refuses to rot.