Try it Live at https://agentowl.netlify.app/knoogle.
knOOgle launched on October 24, 2026, as a deliberately minimalist alternative to mainstream search. Positioned as “what Google would have been in 1999 if it had been built for the open web instead of the ad web,” it delivers a single search box, two buttons, zero clutter, and results pulled exclusively from free, keyless public APIs—all running entirely in your browser.
Core Idea
knOOgle is a client-side meta-search tool. Your query fans out in parallel across a curated set of open data sources. Results are ranked, filtered for safety, optionally re-ranked with on-device embeddings, and stored locally in IndexedDB. You can export everything to Markdown or JSON. There is no account, no server-side index of your searches, no tracking, and no contact with OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google endpoints.
Feature Breakdown
Sources (toggleable)
Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Library, Datamuse, Free Dictionary, REST Countries, OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, PubMed, DOAJ, Zenodo, arXiv, Hacker News, Lobsters, Dev.to, GDELT, npm, PyPI, Stack Overflow, GitHub, crates.io, CoinGecko, Frankfurter, and more. Developers get first-class access to package registries, code repositories, academic papers, and community forums.
Example: Dev.to as one of the APIs
knOOgle includes the Dev.to public API as a native source. When enabled, searches return recent posts from the developer blogging platform. For instance, a technical query can surface articles such as this Dev.to post directly in the ranked results, complete with title, snippet, URL, and source attribution. This makes it easy to pull practical developer writing alongside GitHub repos, npm packages, arXiv papers, and Stack Overflow threads without leaving the same clean interface.
Ranking & Relevance
Results combine keyword overlap, freshness, safety signals, and spam scoring. Optional semantic re-ranking uses a lightweight local 384-dimension hash embedder. You can also opt in to a real on-device sentence-transformer model (~22 MB) that runs entirely in the browser.
Local-First Storage & Export
Every interesting link is saved in IndexedDB under knoogle-v1. One-click export produces Markdown or JSON. The entire application stays under 300 KB.
Slash Commands
/help, /webhook <url>, /embed [on|off|status], /stats, /saved, /history, /settings, /export [md|json], /json, /discovery, /clear, and others.
Agent & Developer Integration
knOOgle is explicitly agent-friendly:
-
?q=<query>— auto-runs the search -
?q=<query>&format=json— returns structured JSON -
?webhook=<https-url>— POSTs results to your endpoint - Discovery files via
llms.txtandagent-search.json - Schema.org markup for easy bot detection
A minimal Playwright snippet is provided for headless use.
Privacy Model
Only the query text leaves the browser, and only to the APIs you explicitly enable. No cookies, analytics, telemetry, or accounts.
Who It’s For
- Developers who want package, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, and arXiv results without ad noise
- Privacy-conscious users and researchers who prefer local control
- AI agent builders who need a lightweight, keyless, JSON-native search surface
Limitations
knOOgle is not a full-web crawler. Coverage is limited to the public APIs it queries. It shines for technical, academic, and open-data queries.
knOOgle is not trying to be the next Google. It is a focused, browser-native instrument for searching the parts of the web that still publish open, keyless data—exactly the surfaces many developers care about most.
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