About
Why one person is building a search engine.
The builder, the name, the search geometry underneath it, and Patch the mascot.
Who's building this
About Nic.
I have spent the last decade or so writing software and watching search change from a way out to the web into a place that tries to keep you. The answer is often hidden under summaries, panels, sponsored filler, and pages written more for ranking systems than for readers.
I started building Argand about a year ago, on evenings and weekends, in pure Rust and without a co-founder. It is one person and a lot of coffee, aimed at a goal simple enough to write on a napkin: you ask the question, Argand finds the source, and you leave with the page that has it.
The business model matters because it changes what the tool wants from you. There are no investors and there won't be. Revenue is going to come from contextual ads, the kind that match the search term instead of your behaviour, and paid API access for developers. Both push toward the same habit: answer the question well.
That is the whole test. The engine either does the job or it does not. I am building it to do the job.
What's an Argand?
Jean-Robert Argand (1768–1822)
Jean-Robert Argand kept the books for a print shop in Paris and did maths on the side. In 1806 he self-published a short essay that finally explained something mathematicians had been arguing about for two hundred years: where the so-called complex numbers actually live.
Ordinary numbers live on one line. Go right and they get bigger, left and they go negative. Zero is the door in the middle.
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Prefer to read? The whole story in words
Jean-Robert Argand kept the books for a print shop in Paris and did maths on the side. In 1806 he self-published a short essay that finally explained something mathematicians had been arguing about for two hundred years: where the so-called complex numbers actually live.
Quick refresher. Ordinary numbers sit on a left-right line. Positive numbers go right and get bigger. Negative numbers go left. Zero is the door in the middle. This is the number line you drew in school.
Then mathematicians ran into a snag: what is the square root of −1? On the left-right line there is no answer. Nothing you can square gives you a negative. But the equations kept demanding one. So they called it i (short for "imaginary") and used it anyway, because skipping it broke things that otherwise worked. For two centuries, nobody could say what i actually was. They were doing maths with a ghost.
Argand's idea: i isn't on the line. It is perpendicular to it. Positive and negative go left and right. i goes up. −i goes down. The square root of −1 isn't imaginary. It just lives on an axis nobody had drawn yet, at a right angle to the ordinary numbers.
Every "complex" number is now just an address: how far across, how far up. Two coordinates. A 2D map of numbers. That map is what we call the Argand plane.
And here is the magical part. Once a number is a point on a plane, multiplying numbers turns out to mean rotating them. Multiply by i and you spin a quarter-turn anticlockwise. Four turns and you are home. That single observation now lives underneath huge chunks of physics, electrical engineering, signal processing, audio, radio, and the GPU rendering this page.
I named the engine after him for two reasons. First: he took an entrenched problem and turned it on its side. That's the move. The current search market is two enormous incumbents and a handful of resellers riding their indexes; the opening is the one Argand walked through. Second: the same idea, blown up, runs inside Argand. The Argand Plane is the in-house vector store every Argand service is built on. It plots every query and every page as a point in a high-dimensional plane. Same trick as Jean-Robert's, just with more axes. Searching the web turns out to be a geometry problem. Geometry is what Argand does.
Under the hood
Argand owns every piece of the engine.
Most small search engines are a thin coat of paint over someone else's index. Argand built and runs every piece itself. Here is what that means, in plain terms, with the full technical detail in the read-more below for the curious.
Most small search engines are a thin coat of paint over someone else's search index and ranking model. Argand is not. Every piece of the engine was built in-house and runs on hardware Argand controls.
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Prefer the technical detail? Read on.
The vector store: Argand Plane
The Argand Plane is the in-house vector store, named after the section above for good reason. It indexes with an graph on a tiered coarse-centroid plus per-cluster layout, the structure that keeps an query fast even as the index grows. Writes go through a transactional store, so the index stays consistent and recovers cleanly after an interrupted write. The distance functions for cosine and L2 similarity, plus the dot product, are accelerated on AVX2 and NEON, with no GPU required at query time. Hybrid retrieval is built in, so BM25+ sparse retrieval and dense ANN live in the same index and are returned together to the rerank stage. Each document can carry named vectors, which means one document can hold a semantic embedding alongside a lexical one and an image one, all queryable in a single trip.
Most search startups bolt on a hosted vector store such as Pinecone or Qdrant. Plane is ours. There is no external API, no per-vector bill, and no third-party uptime page standing between the question and the answer.
Where the index lives
The index runs on an actual server rather than a pile of API keys. The underlying pool is 80 TB of RAIDZ2 on a Hetzner SX65 dedicated machine, with local NVMe for hot paths and spinning disk for the long tail. The index and its metadata live in a transactional store, so a write is all-or-nothing and survives a crash. Document blobs sit on a custom ZFS layout sized for the real access pattern, written as compressed text packs that are read-only after ingest.
Tier-2 query serving runs on a modest 4 to 8 core machine. The SX65 and a local RTX 4070 only do the heavy lifting once per crawl. Hetzner states that it powers its facilities with renewable energy. The query path is CPU-only with no graphics card, so the energy each search uses is small, and the serving cost stays essentially flat against query volume with no GPU bill. That is the link between the sustainability story and the Rot Economy promise: the query path does not create an inference bill that has to be paid back by making the product worse.
Meet the mascot
Patch the Potato
Argand's mascot is a potato named Patch. The name comes from the engineering slang for low-powered hardware: "runs on a potato." That's the promise. If Argand can run well on a potato, it'll run brilliantly everywhere else.
Patch shows up throughout Argand as a reminder of what we're building toward: software that does not require a GPU, a fast connection, or a cutting-edge device before it can answer an ordinary question.