The roadmap

Everything that's coming, and everything that isn't yet.

Search is the foundation. Eleven more surfaces are in development on the same principles. This page is also where I am honest about what Argand cannot do well yet — and why.

The Argand ecosystem

Search is just the beginning.

One platform. 59 microservices and 47 in-house Rust crates in development; the twelve below are the user-facing surfaces. All built on the same principles: fast, private, lightweight, and owned by no one but me.

Tap any service to see why it exists and what it does.

A note before launch

Version one is never finished.

I am one person, and the first public version of Argand will reflect that. The corpus is going to be small compared to anything you are used to. Some searches will come back empty. Services like Maps, Scholar, and Discovery will roll out in stages over the months after launch, not all at once. Some things will work fine in testing and break the moment real people touch them. None of that is a disclaimer; it is just how shipping software goes when one person is doing it.

What I can promise is this:

  • Every email to nic@argand.org goes straight to me, gets read, and gets answered.
  • Every failed search you report gets investigated. Real searches, real failures, real fixes.
  • No analytics on you, no behavioural profiling, no growth-hacker tactics. Just the engine, getting better.
  • Fixes ship fast. I am not gating them behind quarterly product cycles.

Thank you for being early. The thing only gets good if you tell me when it is not.

Nic Weyand

Tell me what you'd want from it

An unusual section to put on a launch page

Things Argand will be worse at than Google on day one.

Most pre-launch pages oversell. This is the list of places Argand won't be ready yet. If you came to a search engine for any of these and got nothing back, this section is the explanation.

  1. Corpus size.

    Google's index is in the trillions of pages. At public-launch Argand's will be in the millions, with priority coverage of the domains people actually want (open web reference material, academic, news, technical documentation) and weaker coverage of the long-tail commercial web. The gap closes with each crawl.

  2. Breaking news latency.

    A traditional crawl-and-index pipeline lags real-world events by hours. Until PressTrace ships the streaming ingestion path, Argand will surface yesterday's news, not the last ten minutes'. For active events, Google still wins.

  3. Image and video search.

    Visual-service exists internally but won't ship to the public surface in version one. Reverse-image lookup, screenshot-to-source, and video keyframe search all come later. If you need to find the original of an image you've got, Google or TinEye will still be the answer at launch.

  4. Shopping and product search.

    Argand has no shopping vertical, no product comparison rail, no price-tracking. That is by design. Every shopping engine I have ever seen monetises by selling the click to the highest bidder, which violates the Traffic-Out Principle. A real anti-bidding shopping vertical is a project of its own. Not in version one.

  5. Maps, Discovery, Scholar, the rest.

    Most of the services on the ecosystem page are in development, not ready. Search is what ships first; the others roll out in stages over the months after launch as each one clears its own quality gate. The waitlist tells you when each goes live.

  6. Languages outside English / a few EU languages.

    The first index is heavy on English, with reasonable coverage of French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Other languages will return results but quality is uneven. The embeddings are weaker, the spell-correction dictionaries smaller, and the gold-set for the regression gate thin. Quality climbs with crawl volume and with community-contributed evaluation queries.

None of these are excuses. They are commitments. Every one is on the roadmap, every one has a build path. If you hit a gap that isn't on this list, that's worth knowing about: nic@argand.org.

Why this is

Mostly: I'm one guy, and the hardware got too expensive.

If you read that list and thought "sure, but why?", here is the honest version. It comes down to a few things.

First, it is only me. No cofounder, no employees, while Google has thousands of search engineers and the budget to match. Most of what is missing is not blocked on a hard problem, it is just waiting for me to get to it.

Tap, swipe, or use the arrow keys.

None of this changes much in the next six months. A year after launch most of it will be a little less true than it is at launch. That is about as honest as I can make it.

Prefer to read? The honest version in full.

It is only me. No cofounder, no employees. Google has thousands of search engineers and the budget to match. Most of what is not ready yet is not waiting on some hard breakthrough. It is waiting on me to get to it. There are weeks where the most important thing I can do for the project is sleep.

I was planning to scale up the crawl and the index in early 2026. Then everything that involves a GPU got expensive. A consumer card that was around 1,600 dollars in 2023 is closer to 3,500 now, when you can find one. I have a saved tab that refreshes the Nvidia store every few minutes for a card I needed in February. Cloud GPU rentals are up roughly fivefold, because every chatbot startup with a check is renting the same capacity I am. So Argand is running on the index I could afford, not the index I planned for.

Google has been crawling the web since I was a kid. Argand started in 2025. They have had close to three decades to learn how the web behaves at scale, sorting real pages from spam and learning which links rot the day after you index them. Argand has to learn all of that from a cold start. It gets better every crawl. The deep historical stuff that vanished ten years ago probably never fully catches up.

Part of what is missing is missing because I refuse to ship it. There is no tracking pixel telling me which results people lingered on, which is what engagement-based ranking actually is at every other engine. I will not put an AI summary above the results, because if the summary is the answer, then the ranking underneath can be garbage and no one notices. And there is no shopping vertical, because every shopping vertical I have ever seen sorts by who paid the most, and that is the exact thing Argand exists not to do.