We don't rentour search results.We read the web.
Most AI products answer your question by paying someone else for search results. askFinz built its own index instead — harder to build, far cheaper to run, and the one thing every answer depends on is ours rather than rented.
a page arrives/
├── L1/
│ ├── handles ~2 in 3
│ ├── speed milliseconds
│ └── cost negligible
├── L2/ only if L1 could not
│ ├── handles ~1 in 3
│ └── cost higher
└── L3/ only if L2 could not
├── handles <0.1%
└── cost highest
kept afterwards/
├── the meaning, not the keywords
├── citable back to the source
└── a few KB per page on diskThree stages. Almost nothing reaches the third.
Pages differ enormously in how hard they are to read. Rather than treat them all the same, each one starts cheap and only escalates if it has to.
≈ 2 in 3
Most pages are read here, in milliseconds, at almost no cost.
≈ 1 in 3
A substantial minority need more work to read properly, and escalate automatically.
< 0.1%
The stubborn few — handled with the heaviest tools, only where it is warranted.
A page moves to the next stage only when the one before it could not read it properly. That is the whole cost model: the heaviest machinery runs on well under a percent of what we read, so reading all of it stays affordable.
Most sites never notice us, because there is very little to notice.
Starting cheap is usually described as our saving. It is just as much the site's. Every page starts at the lightest method that can read it, and only the small remainder that genuinely needs more gets more — so a publisher sees ordinary requests spread out over time rather than a burst that shows up on their dashboard as a problem to deal with.
A fraction of the weight
The heaviest machinery runs on well under a percent of what we read. Every page starts at the cheapest method that can do the job, which is most of why reading the whole web is affordable — for us and for the sites.
Paced, not hammered
Reading is spread across time and across the machines doing it. No site sees a flood, because nothing about how we work rewards going fast at one publisher.
Read once, reused
A page read once answers questions for everyone. Nobody's search sends fresh traffic at a publisher, which is the difference between an index and a tool that fetches on demand.
We take a check at face value
We do not buy captcha-solving services. In practice the question comes up rarely — the overwhelming majority of what we read never puts a check in front of us, and only a fraction of a percent ever reaches L3 at all. Where a site does ask, we treat that as the site's decision to make. Publishers who want their material read can simply tell us, and it gets read properly rather than argued with.
Every machine reading is accounted for
Reading runs on infrastructure we operate and can account for, every machine enrolled and identifiable to us. None of it is anonymous capacity bought by the hour from a broker. That is why we can say exactly what the fleet does, show it working in the open, and answer for how it behaves.
Being light is the point rather than a side effect. A reader gets a faster answer, a publisher gets left alone, and we get to read far more of the web for the same money.
Owning the index changes what we can offer.
We read the web ourselves
Most AI products buy their web results from someone else's index. askFinz runs its own — the reading, the ranking and the storage are all ours.
Nothing is rented
No per-query bill to a third-party search provider, and no ceiling set by their rate limits. What it costs to answer a question is something we control.
It cannot be taken away
Providers change terms, raise prices and close APIs. A product built on a rented index inherits every one of those decisions. Ours doesn't.
It fits what we're asked
Because the index is ours, it can hold whatever turns out to matter — new subjects, new formats, new collections — rather than only what a supplier chose to sell.
Spread out, on purpose.
The work is shared across many machines rather than concentrated in one place. That keeps it cheap, keeps it close to the pages being read, and means no single failure stops it.
Our own index servers
The core of the fleet, always on and always ours.
Every surface askFinz runs on
The extension, the desktop app, devices running askFinz OS — each able to lend a hand.
Machines close to the page
Reading happens near the source rather than routing everything through one place.
Partner installations
Publishers who want their own material read well can host a node themselves.
You can watch it running at live status, which reads from the same system this page does.
Reading ahead of time means answering now.
Because pages are read and understood before anyone asks, a question does not wait on the web. These are the live numbers from the running system.
query → vector on the GPU pool · payload-indexed SafeSearch filter · deterministic result cache
How a page becomes an answer
seen → read → understood → answerableFour steps, and no waiting in between.
A traditional index rebuilds on a schedule, so what it knows is always a little out of date. Here the last step happens the moment the first one does — a page seen now is answerable now.
Seen
A page is reached — by the crawler working through the web, or by the extension as somebody reads it.
Read properly
Menus and clutter come off. Documents are read all the way through. Pages that only assemble in a browser get built first.
Understood
What the page means is worked out and stored — not just the words on it, so a question can match an idea rather than a keyword.
Answerable
It becomes searchable immediately, and any answer drawn from it cites the page it came from.
Is the index available on its own, as an API?
Not today. The index powers askFinz Search and the apps built on it, and is not currently sold or licensed as a standalone feed. That is a decision rather than a limitation — if there is enough industry interest, opening it up is something we would look at.
Why does storage per page matter so much?
It is the difference between an index that can afford to grow and one that cannot. Costs scale with every page held, so a few kilobytes either way decides whether reading the whole web is a business or a bonfire.
Does more machinery mean slower answers?
No — the opposite. Reading is spread out and done ahead of time, so by the time you ask a question the work is already finished.