Don’t Give Up on Snapchat

It’s been a tough two weeks for Snap, following a tough year. Even two solid executive hires couldn’t overshadow this week’s earnings report – which warned its daily audience will continue to shrink. The company’s stock reached an all-time low below $6 a share this week and has lost half its market value this year. Investors think Snap is one-third as valuable as Twitter.

It’s tempting to think Snap’s best days are behind it or that an acquisition from Jeff Bezos – whom I hear is the one tech CEO Evan Spiegel actually seems to respect – is on the horizon. Indeed, the press has largely run with this theme recently, even as Spiegel has tried to put it to bed. But despite the challenges or the fact it may (will) never be as big as Facebook, I think it is too early to give up on Snap. Here’s why.

Snap’s 186 million daily users still spend a heck of a lot of time on it – in fact 30 minutes a day on average. Twitter doesn’t report its daily users, to avoid comparisons exactly like the one I am about to make. But the company says that less than half its 326 million monthly users are daily, meaning Snap’s daily audience is bigger (than Twitter).

Twitter has 2.5 times Snap’s revenue and investors are currently valuing it at three times the market cap. Snap grew revenues 43% percent in the last quarter. Twitter grew 29% percent.

Of course, Twitter and Snap users are doing different things. Snap’s users are heavily into messaging while Twitter’s users are browsing tweets, articles and videos. The latter is much more appealing to advertisers – which partially explains why Twitter’s revenues are larger. But I believe there will be new ways to make money through messaging – ways Snap invents or can copy from others like Facebook over time.

Speaking of Facebook, while Instagram’s growth is impressive, Snap has a bigger share of Facebook’s core market than meets the eye. Snap has nearly half as many monthly users in the U.S. and Canada as Facebook. That’s a big chunk in a market where Facebook makes half its revenue. Investors think Snap is currently two percent as valuable as Facebook.

Another reason I think it is too early to count Snap out: social media companies, and all businesses for that matter, often go through periods of stagnation. Snap had a similar rut before it bought Looksery in 2015, a deal which allowed users to add more filters to their selfies. Some of us will remember back to 2007, before its IPO, when Facebook’s user growth also stalled. The company ramped up its growth team and changed its fortunes. Ruts are real and not always a time to cue the MySpace comparisons.

And then there is the fact that I don’t think the competitive landscape is as intractable as it seems. I strongly believe that five years from now, digital consumer services in the U.S. will be more fragmented, not less.

Markets go through phases of centralization and decentralization, and the pendulum will eventually swing back. It’s also the sense that when we hit a new type of innovation in the consumer market, the big guys (Facebook, Google, Amazon) aren’t going to be able to buy it up as easily as they once did, thanks to, among other things, more regulatory scrutiny.

The U.S. marketing business is big enough to support lots of digital consumer services; entrepreneurs just have to build new things consumers want to use more than existing products.

What’s Next

None of this to say that a Snap turnaround is a done deal. As BTIG analyst and Snap close-follower Rich Greenfield said to me, “The ball is in Evan’s court.”

What he means is Spiegel needs to prove he can fulfill his promise to get the product to appeal to older users. I was struck by how many times Spiegel, on his earnings call, spoke about the need to “expand from the core” to reach older users.

That’s going to take a lot more than coming up with a better marketing story – although that would help. The company seems to have shifted its self-description from being “a camera company” to the “fastest way to visually communicate with close friends and family.” (Although it still uses the somewhat-confusing first phrase officially.)

Call me 35, but I still think texting is a lot faster than snapping a photo, adding some text and waiting for it to send. Saying Amazon “Echo, call grandma” is also pretty fast.

So Snap is going to have to keep working to get me and my friends and family to use the product daily. While I don’t think it’s a given that Spiegel can pull it off, he definitely has some runway to try and I am somewhat surprised investors aren’t showing more faith. He has built a business with nearly 200 million daily users. That’s not a small feat.

How much runway he has depends on Snap’s cash situation too, which is precarious. The company insists it is heading towards break-even, but it is still unclear how it will get there. Spiegel’s dictatorial management style continues to irk many of his employees and some of his board, but he’s entrenched through his voting control and has no plans to go anywhere.

I’m Gary Fung. I started isoHunt.com as a hobby 15 years ago. Now I’m starting WonderSwipe, my 2nd hobby. I’m hoping it can also be something more, and it never hurts to aim high.

Many have tried breaking Google’s search monopoly. I believe they all failed because no one, not even Microsoft with Bing/Yahoo, can attack Google’s search monopoly head on. Against Google’s AI brain trust, data and infrastructure, there can be no victory. But that also doesn’t mean everyone should give up and stop innovating in web search, as it is stagnating.

First, what was the last great monopoly? Windows. What broke it? It’s not really broken, but iPhone, and smartphones by extension, are making PCs less and less relevant.

You can’t depose the king but you can shrink the kingdom. (this is probably a poor analogy)

I believe with ever smarter AI, Google will continue being the dominant search engine. No one knows how to run a more optimized and scalable search engine than Google. But I see ways around the gatekeeper to human knowledge, because I believe there’s more to the whole search/research experience and knowledge curation for people, than just algorithms and infrastructure:

1. A userland tool, a mobile frontend, where Google has failed to innovate other than “simply” transplanting desktop’s search UI and maintaining search ranking algos. This is WonderSwipe’s phase 1, which was launched on the iOS App Store last week.
2. A real social layer for search: with WonderSwipe’s highlights, you will curate and crowdsource the best bits of information on each search query. Highlighting will be as easy as long-pressing a summary in WonderSwipe. Make curating the best of human knowledge on the Web a more human process again. Human expertise and curation is not something AI can supplant.
3. Fragmenting search options. With an easy UI at point of search input, you can easily choose DuckDuckGo (or whatever else) for private searches, Amazon (or ___) for shopping, Baidu for China, etc. Make search engines pluggable and by vertical, thus less reliant on any single search engine as the one stop shop. Vertical search engines are also more tailored for each vertical and can be better than Google’s one size fits all. (I know from isoHunt)

Below is the what and the how of WonderSwipe’s phase 1, as launched last week. The devil is in the details. Here’s my proposal to completely rethink how we search and curate knowledge, for fun and profit. And in the process, not just in service of feeding our eyeballs to the ad machine either, as we realize now more and more that our Time is Not Well Spent.

I won’t claim I have the whole product-market-fit figured out yet for WonderSwipe, so please tell me if this is crazy/lame/won’t work/awesome/anything in between.

WonderSwipe has launched on the iOS App Store since 4/18! Get it now for free. Read on for why I think it is the biggest thing to search since Google itself, and watch our 30s demo video below for how. If you think it’s awesome too, tell us and vote for us here.

There’s too much stuff online & too little time on the go to fuss with browser tabs or going back & forth in browser history.

When was the last time you did some serious googling on your smartphone? According to stats like this and the domination of time spent on mobile over desktop, not likely to be recent or frequently. For me, not unless I’m stuck with mobile Safari or Chrome without a laptop. Mobile websites, including Google itself, stuffing more ads above the fold on smartphones’ limited screen space compared to desktop haven’t helped the UX.

👉🏼 So, here’s 3 scenarios to use WonderSwipe instead of conventional browsers, so mobile search stop sucking:

1. Too slow; Didn’t search?
   10–100x article loading and browsing speed, as measured in-app. Even more drastic difference over slow data networks.
2. Too many results; Didn’t browse?
   No tabs: Easily swipe through search results, no clicks or background tab tab tab tab tabs needed.
   Hands-free mode: Automated browsing, with search result summaries read out like audiobooks and scrolled in-sync.
3. Too long; Didn’t read (TL;DR)?
   Reader mode (like Pocket, Safari’s) with summarization of each search result, where possible.

After 2 years of development, I believe my solution is ready. WonderSwipe is designed from the ground up to find the answers you search for, in the fastest way possible. With the Internet’s enabling of prolific information overload and the recent backlash against Facebook (newsfeed), Youtube (autoplay), Snapchat (snapstreaks), etc. We want to create the opposite of a time sink, for truly time well spent. We want to create new, efficient and meaningful ways of information searching, curating and sharing. We are a counterpoint to time spent maximalists like the ad-driven social apps, we want to be time minimizing. Here’s demo videos of WonderSwipe’s phase 1 launching on the App Store, which I’d say is about half feature complete.

Note that WonderSwipe is not a browser. It’s something different, a research and reference tool. It augments search best when your search is non-trivial, and turns up informational articles to which WonderSwipe can do text extraction and summarization. WonderSwipe’s phase 2 will add highlighting and annotation for your own reference, as well as making it sharable in a social layer so learners can help other learners like you, quickly sifting and surfacing diamonds in the search results rough. For every topic searchable.

This web scale social highlighting we believe will shift us towards more meaningful sharing and time well spent in learning and curating, by going beyond simplistic likes and hearts that festers in viral engagement metrics, driving sensationalism, fake news and time sinks for advertising.

WonderSwipe for now at launch is the not-browser, with the sole goal of making search and finding your answers buried in results ridiculously fast. It does include in-app browser (SafariView on iOS) as a 1-tap fallback when you want the full HTML for some websites to function. (globe icon on bottom right of app, in the demo video)

With my 11 years experience working on the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt, and before that, using and watching Google’s development since its beginning. I believe WonderSwipe is shaping up to be the biggest user experience improvement in Web search, since Google itself. And that begins with us waking up to the fact that mobile search right now, is sucking.

The Web’s Problem

With the proliferation of content, web search is getting more tedious. It’s exacerbated on smartphones. I would tap on a promising search result, wait 5 seconds (rather optimistic on the best cell network conditions), read a bit, see that it doesn’t concern what I’m looking for, tap back in browser to Google’s search page, scroll to another promising search result, rinse and repeat. It’s just too tedious and slow to do any serious search on a non-trivial topic of interest.

This pattern is similar on desktop browsers, though it’s better with the aid of faster WiFi, easy switching between browser tabs (so you can background load search results without all the click and wait), browser extensions, and easy Cmd-F / Ctrl-F to highlight keywords within found webpages for quick skimming.

But what if you can conduct mobile search 10–100x faster, with all the niceties I listed above in desktop browsers?

Well all except one, WonderSwipe can’t give you fast WiFi everywhere. But it does compensate for slow networks, possibly going beyond desktop access speed in the overall search experience. (SX for short from here on, as in UX)

WonderSwipe’s Solution

This is what WonderSwipe offers, for your knowledge presenting super-smart phone:

• Navigate from search result to search result, by swiping through them horizontally, like you would swipe through a gallery of photos. The cornerstone of WonderSwipe is this completely gestural 2D UI. (more below)
• Right after Google return a page of search results, WonderSwipe goes to work, loading all 10 results in the background, in parallel. So the first result you swipe to may still take 5s like normal browsers (but likely less), further results you swipe to will take no wait time.
  This is the worst case of 10x faster knowledge access I stated in title.
• Each result will either be presented with the original HTML and Javascript of the webpage (above worst case for load time), or if detected to be an article with a main body of text to extract (powered by the former Readability), that text will be further summarized and presented instead.
  This article text extraction + summary avoids Javascript, HTML rendering and early image loading, which cuts result access time by another factor of 2 on average, even with the added mobile CPU processing in summarization. Blocking of ads and otherwise undesirables in articles that require Javascript is a side-effect, and necessary for speeding up access for users like you, without compromise.
• If article summaries are presented, the full text of the webpage can be viewed by tapping one of the summaries. The paragraph containing that summary would be scrolled to in the origianl text.
• If an article was found by your previous search, or a search by any other user of WonderSwipe, the result with summary is cached in our cloud. Results from our cloud cache would take only ~0.5s to load! That’s another factor of 10 in reduced load time, for a total of up to 100x faster knowledge access.

And, bonus:

• Keywords of your search query are highlighted on each search result, in HTML webpages, extracted article texts or summaries.
• WonderSwipe stays in portrait mode while you read, even if you’re fussing with toilet paper and what not on your quest for knowledge and inevitably and unwittingly rotate your phone. You could read search results expanded in a full Web view, and only there is landscape mode enabled for images and videos.
• Hands-free mode. Turn your search results into an audiobook! On any summarized search result, tapping the 📢 speaker icon turns on text-to-speech mode. The current summary sentence in view is read, and the summaries scroll down as they are read. When all summaries of a search result are read, WonderSwipe “swipe” itself to the next summarized search result, read out the article title, and proceed reading its summary. This continues until you tap the speaker icon again to stop, or it reaches the end of up to 10 results on the current Google search page.
• Thumbnail images of search results are preversed and showcased as bouncy headers. On summarized articles, other found images are listed together below the summaries.
• Extract web links in copied text from another app, and do a 1 tap search for that link, summarized and all. (🔍 Paste: <link> on bottom)

A note that my up to 100x faster knowledge access benchmark is network dependent (obviously). Due to WonderSwipe’s approach of article text-first-and-only loading, in parallel, further accelerated by cached summaries, the overall improvement may actually be even more profound when comparing WonderSwipe vs. conventional browsers over particularly slow, intermittent mobile networks.

I’ve also not quantitatively included further knowledge transfer improvements, resulting from article summaries and search keyword highlights as those are somewhat subjective. WonderSwipe’s current naive summarization algorithm compresses word count to ~40% of original text on average, so consider at face value another 2x factor in speeding up article reading. And depending on your speed reading ability, keyword highlights is a great aid in speeding up text scanning further still, to extract meaning as you skim over search results. So I could bump my benchmark up to 200x or more, but who’s counting what’s already an astronomical improvement? 😅

And what about voice search, you say? Browsing search results is so last millennium. Yes that’s useful, but that only speeds up the query input part in a serious topical search. If it’s a trivial search like this, WonderSwipe isn’t the solution it’s designed for. You’d find the answer directly on the first page of search results, using WonderSwipe or any old-school browser. Or you could indeed just ask Siri or Google or Alexa or Cortana.

If your search is non-trivial however, like “is AI a threat to humanity”, that’ll take some digging beyond even the first page of search results, and voice assistants are unlikely to give a simple answer (or any answer). Siri for one defaults to web search when it can’t give a simple, factual answer, and that happens often. You may not find any good answer while googling either, and you’ll have to refine your search query. All of which involves skimming search results to decipher relevance, and this kind of non-trivial search is exactly what WonderSwipe is designed for.

Design Philosophy

WonderSwipe came out of my realization that mobile search is slow. Too slow, and we oftentimes don’t bother until a later time on a desktop, or none at all when you forget. What’s the point of the Web being a Great Library of human knowledge, if our computing paradigm moved from desktop to mobile, and we take a collective step backward and no longer bother accessing this library?

The problem is speed of access and knowledge transfer.

On the other hand, WonderSwipe is not a browser replacement. It’s a superset, focused around search. Not all search results are articles with text that can be extracted and summarized. When WonderSwipe fails, on web apps for example that cannot function without Javascript, the original HTML webpage is rendered by default, or you can load it explicitly by opening Web view within the app.

WonderSwipe attempts to extract meaning (article text) wherever it can, and when it does, it further apply algorithmic summarization to solve your TL;DR problem, which is especially apparent on the go. So that’s a further cognitive load reduction, beyond the measurable 100x load time reduction in the entire Search Experience.

In optimizing SX, I realized the workflow of the standard browser is one dimensional. You click a link, you go back, you click another link, you go back again or you click on a new link. It’s a linear timeline which you go back and forth in. But why be limited to a 1D UI, when you can swipe in 2D and flow from one search result directly to the next? Lists of search results are already conveniently sequenced for this, WonderSwipe just lays them all out horizontally. Swipe left or right for the next or previous search results, up and down to get into the summary and images or full text of a particular search result. Perfect, fluid and completely gestural in 2D, as it’s meant for the modern smartphone.

Which brings us to the name of the app. In making swipes the singular centre of user interaction without buttons, it becomes a wonder to access the knowledge of the Web. And infinitely so — on reaching the end of search results 1–10, another swipe left automatically searches the next page on Google. Further swipes continue to results 11–20, 21–30, etc.

And in each search result, for articles that split themselves into multiple webpages that you’d normally have to tap “Next” in-between, WonderSwipe also attempts to fetch all article pages and present them as 1 singular body of text, which gets summarized together. Nifty!

Attention is the New Scarcity

To optimize for SX completely and without compromise, I suggest breaking the current loser proposition of the user in the Web ecosystem. For you the user are not Google’s customer, nor are you for most web publishers. If you didn’t pay them, you are just eyeballs for their true customers, the advertisers. Your convenience in reading and optimizing for knowledge access isn’t their priority, distracting you with ads actually is.

But your attention is valuable.

More valuable than ever, with the Web’s overflow of information. Attention is the new scarcity, as we get less and less bored. Thus, optimizing SX from the ground up in the user’s perspective is all the more important, and demands fundamental rethinking. The extraneous gunk websites carry, either intentionally for monetization, or unintentionally with non-optimal heavy design or otherwise legacy design that’s not responsive to the mobile small screen and slower networks. Without fixing them holistically client-side, the mobile web continues slipping into irrelevance. There’s a saying: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Let’s stop buying their ropes.

This means optimizing knowledge extraction on the Web to its logical end. By dropping Javascript altogether — ads, tracking and interactivity, WonderSwipe is able to achieve that 10–100x access speed-up without compromise. Web view is a button tap away for search results that need it, but serves only as a fallback on your explicit request.

Which brings us to the mission statement… 🥁🥁🥁

The Future

To make WonderSwipe an even bigger wonder, with our mission to Make the Web Yours. Here’s my rough roadmap: (I’ll write more about them later)

• Improve article text extraction and summarization. I’m currently just using untuned, off the shelves libraries.
• Offline referencing and search, on locally cached prior search results.
• A social curation layer for every web search: Bookmarking, highlighting and annotation. Privately useful first, communally beneficial second — a private research and note taking tool, while also reduce friction from search query to knowledge for the whole Web.
• Q&A, for the truly hard search queries with no relevant results found. Think lifelines like phone a friend on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Yes there’s Quora, but I’m looking for a more open system, and one more integratable with search queries.
• Explicit sharing that’s way more useful than LMGTFY. Think embeddable, curated search results.
• Personalized/recommended trending searches. Top new interesting searches of the day for some communal discovery.
• Extensions to supercharge certain categories of websites with additional, useful data. Example: price history on shopping search results, fake news check. An open API for evolving a new open standard.
• Build/use a better general search engine than Google (maybe). Bing, DuckDuckGo? Add other specialty search engines like Amazon for different verticals (definitely).
• Adopt BATs, if it doesn’t fizzle out.
• Create a KnowledgeCoin to let users fund authors, curators directly. If the ICO bubble hasn’t burst first.
• Resize app for (Apple) watches, tablets, TVs, AR glasses, VR googles.

Questions and comments? I want to hear them! I can’t do this without your input. This is the most exciting idea and project I’ve started since isoHunt in 2003. I hope you find WonderSwipe as useful as I do.

Read more about our thinking about problems we want to solve in search and knowledge sharing, by following us here on Medium (top of page), or:

• Vote for us and send us feedback on Product Hunt
• Chat with us on Slack, for support questions or feedback
• Follow us on Facebook
• Tweet us

You want to just download WonderSwipe and give it a spin? For those who signed up for beta, you should have received an invite email with code to redeem WonderSwipe on TestFlight. If not, WonderSwipe has launched on the iOS App Store on April 18.

We are working on our Android version now. Stay tuned.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 322,555+ people.

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On breaking monopolies 🤔 Rethink Mobile Search, 10–100x faster. Introducing WonderSwipe 👆🏼 was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UPDATE: WonderSwipe has launched on the iOS App Store since 4/18! Get it now for free. Read on for why I think it is the biggest thing to search since Google itself, and watch our 30s demo video below for how. If you think it’s awesome too, tell us and vote for us here.

There’s too much stuff online & too little time on the go to fuss with browser tabs or going back & forth in browser history.

When was the last time you did some serious googling on your smartphone? According to stats like this and the domination of time spent on mobile over desktop, not likely to be recent or frequently. For me, not unless I’m stuck with mobile Safari or Chrome without a laptop. Mobile websites, including Google itself, stuffing more ads above the fold on smartphones’ limited screen space compared to desktop haven’t helped the UX.

👉🏼 So, here’s 3 scenarios to use WonderSwipe instead of conventional browsers, so mobile search stop sucking:

1. Too slow; Didn’t search?
   10–100x article loading and browsing speed, as measured in-app. Even more drastic difference over slow data networks.
2. Too many results; Didn’t browse?
   No tabs: Easily swipe through search results, no clicks or background tab tab tab tab tabs needed.
   Hands-free mode: Automated browsing, with search result summaries read out like audiobooks and scrolled in-sync.
3. Too long; Didn’t read (TL;DR)?
   Reader mode (like Pocket, Safari’s) with summarization of each search result, where possible.

After 2 years of development, I believe my solution is ready. WonderSwipe is designed from the ground up to find the answers you search for, in the fastest way possible. With the Internet’s enabling of prolific information overload and the recent backlash against Facebook (newsfeed), Youtube (autoplay), Snapchat (snapstreaks), etc. We want to create the opposite of a time sink, for truly time well spent. We want to create new, efficient and meaningful ways of information searching, curating and sharing. We are a counterpoint to time spent maximalists like the ad-driven social apps, we want to be time minimizing. Here’s demo videos of WonderSwipe’s phase 1 launching on the App Store, which I’d say is about half feature complete.

Note that WonderSwipe is not a browser. It’s something different, a research and reference tool. It augments search best when your search is non-trivial, and turns up informational articles to which WonderSwipe can do text extraction and summarization. WonderSwipe’s phase 2 will add highlighting and annotation for your own reference, as well as making it sharable in a social layer so learners can help other learners like you, quickly sifting and surfacing diamonds in the search results rough. For every topic searchable.

This web scale social highlighting we believe will shift us towards more meaningful sharing and time well spent in learning and curating, by going beyond simplistic likes and hearts that festers in viral engagement metrics, driving sensationalism, fake news and time sinks for advertising.

WonderSwipe for now at launch is the not-browser, with the sole goal of making search and finding your answers buried in results ridiculously fast. It does include in-app browser (SafariView on iOS) as a 1-tap fallback when you want the full HTML for some websites to function. (globe icon on bottom right of app, in the demo video)

My hope in developing this after isoHunt, is that it be useful to people to use more than once a week. By that metric, after intense internal testing (myself 😅) for the last few months, I can say that this has been my first project to pass that bar. I found myself using WonderSwipe for any non-trivial search more useful than mobile browsers. And when I want to have result summaries read out to me, I’d use the app even when I’m on my desktop.

With my 11 years experience working on the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt, and before that, using and watching Google’s development since its beginning. I believe WonderSwipe is shaping up to be the biggest user experience improvement in Web search, since Google itself. And that begins with us waking up to the fact that mobile search right now, is sucking.

The Web’s Problem

With the proliferation of content, web search is getting more tedious. It’s exacerbated on smartphones. I would tap on a promising search result, wait 5 seconds (rather optimistic on the best cell network conditions), read a bit, see that it doesn’t concern what I’m looking for, tap back in browser to Google’s search page, scroll to another promising search result, rinse and repeat. It’s just too tedious and slow to do any serious search on a non-trivial topic of interest.

This pattern is similar on desktop browsers, though it’s better with the aid of faster WiFi, easy switching between browser tabs (so you can background load search results without all the click and wait), browser extensions, and easy Cmd-F / Ctrl-F to highlight keywords within found webpages for quick skimming.

But what if you can conduct mobile search 10–100x faster, with all the niceties I listed above in desktop browsers?

Well all except one, WonderSwipe can’t give you fast WiFi everywhere. But it does compensate for slow networks, possibly going beyond desktop access speed in the overall search experience. (SX for short from here on, as in UX)

WonderSwipe’s Solution

This is what WonderSwipe offers, for your knowledge presenting super-smart phone:

• Navigate from search result to search result, by swiping through them horizontally, like you would swipe through a gallery of photos. The cornerstone of WonderSwipe is this completely gestural 2D UI. (more below)
• Right after Google return a page of search results, WonderSwipe goes to work, loading all 10 results in the background, in parallel. So the first result you swipe to may still take 5s like normal browsers (but likely less), further results you swipe to will take no wait time.
  This is the worst case of 10x faster knowledge access I stated in title.
• Each result will either be presented with the original HTML and Javascript of the webpage (above worst case for load time), or if detected to be an article with a main body of text to extract (powered by the former Readability), that text will be further summarized and presented instead.
  This article text extraction + summary avoids Javascript, HTML rendering and early image loading, which cuts result access time by another factor of 2 on average, even with the added mobile CPU processing in summarization. Blocking of ads and otherwise undesirables in articles that require Javascript is a side-effect, and necessary for speeding up access for users like you, without compromise.
• If article summaries are presented, the full text of the webpage can be viewed by tapping one of the summaries. The paragraph containing that summary would be scrolled to in the origianl text.
• If an article was found by your previous search, or a search by any other user of WonderSwipe, the result with summary is cached in our cloud. Results from our cloud cache would take only ~0.5s to load! That’s another factor of 10 in reduced load time, for a total of up to 100x faster knowledge access.

And, bonus:

• Keywords of your search query are highlighted on each search result, in HTML webpages, extracted article texts or summaries.
• WonderSwipe stays in portrait mode while you read, even if you’re fussing with toilet paper and what not on your quest for knowledge and inevitably and unwittingly rotate your phone. You could read search results expanded in a full Web view, and only there is landscape mode enabled for images and videos.
• Hands-free mode. Turn your search results into an audiobook! On any summarized search result, tapping the 📢 speaker icon turns on text-to-speech mode. The current summary sentence in view is read, and the summaries scroll down as they are read. When all summaries of a search result are read, WonderSwipe “swipe” itself to the next summarized search result, read out the article title, and proceed reading its summary. This continues until you tap the speaker icon again to stop, or it reaches the end of up to 10 results on the current Google search page.
• Thumbnail images of search results are preversed and showcased as bouncy headers. On summarized articles, other found images are listed together below the summaries.
• Extract web links in copied text from another app, and do a 1 tap search for that link, summarized and all. (🔍 Paste: <link> on bottom)

A note that my up to 100x faster knowledge access benchmark is network dependent (obviously). Due to WonderSwipe’s approach of article text-first-and-only loading, in parallel, further accelerated by cached summaries, the overall improvement may actually be even more profound when comparing WonderSwipe vs. conventional browsers over particularly slow, intermittent mobile networks.

I’ve also not quantitatively included further knowledge transfer improvements, resulting from article summaries and search keyword highlights as those are somewhat subjective. WonderSwipe’s current naive summarization algorithm compresses word count to ~40% of original text on average, so consider at face value another 2x factor in speeding up article reading. And depending on your speed reading ability, keyword highlights is a great aid in speeding up text scanning further still, to extract meaning as you skim over search results. So I could bump my benchmark up to 200x or more, but who’s counting what’s already an astronomical improvement? 😅

And what about voice search, you say? Browsing search results is so last millennium. Yes that’s useful, but that only speeds up the query input part in a serious topical search. If it’s a trivial search like this, WonderSwipe isn’t the solution it’s designed for. You’d find the answer directly on the first page of search results, using WonderSwipe or any old-school browser. Or you could indeed just ask Siri or Google or Alexa or Cortana.

If your search is non-trivial however, like “is AI a threat to humanity”, that’ll take some digging beyond even the first page of search results, and voice assistants are unlikely to give a simple answer (or any answer). Siri for one defaults to web search when it can’t give a simple, factual answer, and that happens often. You may not find any good answer while googling either, and you’ll have to refine your search query. All of which involves skimming search results to decipher relevance, and this kind of non-trivial search is exactly what WonderSwipe is designed for.

Design Philosophy

WonderSwipe came out of my realization that mobile search is slow. Too slow, and we oftentimes don’t bother until a later time on a desktop, or none at all when you forget. What’s the point of the Web being a Great Library of human knowledge, if our computing paradigm moved from desktop to mobile, and we take a collective step backward and no longer bother accessing this library?

The problem is speed of access and knowledge transfer.

On the other hand, WonderSwipe is not a browser replacement. It’s a superset, focused around search. Not all search results are articles with text that can be extracted and summarized. When WonderSwipe fails, on web apps for example that cannot function without Javascript, the original HTML webpage is rendered by default, or you can load it explicitly by opening Web view within the app.

WonderSwipe attempts to extract meaning (article text) wherever it can, and when it does, it further apply algorithmic summarization to solve your TL;DR problem, which is especially apparent on the go. So that’s a further cognitive load reduction, beyond the measurable 100x load time reduction in the entire Search Experience.

In optimizing SX, I realized the workflow of the standard browser is one dimensional. You click a link, you go back, you click another link, you go back again or you click on a new link. It’s a linear timeline which you go back and forth in. But why be limited to a 1D UI, when you can swipe in 2D and flow from one search result directly to the next? Lists of search results are already conveniently sequenced for this, WonderSwipe just lays them all out horizontally. Swipe left or right for the next or previous search results, up and down to get into the summary and images or full text of a particular search result. Perfect, fluid and completely gestural in 2D, as it’s meant for the modern smartphone.

Which brings us to the name of the app. In making swipes the singular centre of user interaction without buttons, it becomes a wonder to access the knowledge of the Web. And infinitely so — on reaching the end of search results 1–10, another swipe left automatically searches the next page on Google. Further swipes continue to results 11–20, 21–30, etc.

And in each search result, for articles that split themselves into multiple webpages that you’d normally have to tap “Next” in-between, WonderSwipe also attempts to fetch all article pages and present them as 1 singular body of text, which gets summarized together. Nifty!

Attention is the New Scarcity

To optimize for SX completely and without compromise, I suggest breaking the current loser proposition of the user in the Web ecosystem. For you the user are not Google’s customer, nor are you for most web publishers. If you didn’t pay them, you are just eyeballs for their true customers, the advertisers. Your convenience in reading and optimizing for knowledge access isn’t their priority, distracting you with ads actually is.

But your attention is valuable.

More valuable than ever, with the Web’s overflow of information. Attention is the new scarcity, as we get less and less bored. Thus, optimizing SX from the ground up in the user’s perspective is all the more important, and demands fundamental rethinking. The extraneous gunk websites carry, either intentionally for monetization, or unintentionally with non-optimal heavy design or otherwise legacy design that’s not responsive to the mobile small screen and slower networks. Without fixing them holistically client-side, the mobile web continues slipping into irrelevance. There’s a saying: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Let’s stop buying their ropes.

This means optimizing knowledge extraction on the Web to its logical end. By dropping Javascript altogether — ads, tracking and interactivity, WonderSwipe is able to achieve that 10–100x access speed-up without compromise. Web view is a button tap away for search results that need it, but serves only as a fallback on your explicit request.

Which brings us to the mission statement… 🥁🥁🥁

The Future

To make WonderSwipe an even bigger wonder, with our mission to Make the Web Yours. Here’s my rough roadmap: (I’ll write more about them later)

• Improve article text extraction and summarization. I’m currently just using untuned, off the shelves libraries.
• Offline referencing and search, on locally cached prior search results.
• A social curation layer for every web search: Bookmarking, highlighting and annotation. Privately useful first, communally beneficial second — a private research and note taking tool, while also reduce friction from search query to knowledge for the whole Web.
• Q&A, for the truly hard search queries with no relevant results found. Think lifelines like phone a friend on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Yes there’s Quora, but I’m looking for a more open system, and one more integratable with search queries.
• Explicit sharing that’s way more useful than LMGTFY. Think embeddable, curated search results.
• Personalized/recommended trending searches. Top new interesting searches of the day for some communal discovery.
• Extensions to supercharge certain categories of websites with additional, useful data. Example: price history on shopping search results, fake news check. An open API for evolving a new open standard.
• Build/use a better general search engine than Google (maybe). Bing, DuckDuckGo? Add other specialty search engines like Amazon for different verticals (definitely).
• Adopt BATs, if it doesn’t fizzle out.
• Create a KnowledgeCoin to let users fund authors, curators directly. If the ICO bubble hasn’t burst first.
• Resize app for (Apple) watches, tablets, TVs, AR glasses, VR googles.

Questions and comments? I want to hear them! I can’t do this without your input. This is the most exciting idea and project I’ve started since isoHunt in 2003. I hope you find WonderSwipe as useful as I do.

Read more about our thinking about problems we want to solve in search and knowledge sharing, by following us here on Medium (top of page), or:

• Vote for us and send us feedback on Product Hunt
• Chat with us on Slack, for support questions or feedback
• Follow us on Facebook
• Tweet us

You want to just download WonderSwipe and give it a spin? For those who signed up for beta, you should have received an invite email with code to redeem WonderSwipe on TestFlight. If not, WonderSwipe has launched on the iOS App Store on April 18.

We are working on our Android version now. Stay tuned. I’ll leave you with a choice quote, which says much with few words the problem of our time:

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. ~Herbert A. Simon

Rethink Mobile Search, 10–100x faster. Introducing WonderSwipe 👆🏼 was originally published in WonderSwipe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• “When Apple launched the iPhone, it was immediately profitable,” Greenlight wrote. But Tesla “does not make money selling cars and Mr. Musk shows little interest in profits.”

He means, like Amazon? And Tesla have 20%+ profit margins on current luxury cars they sell, easily twice that of mainstream carmakers.

• “When one person buys an Apple product, it makes the experience for other Apple customers better by supporting the developer ecosystem. This network effect attracts a stable and growing user base. TSLA is unlikely to sustain a competitive advantage by having a network of charging stations or by accumulating driver data.”

Wrong. Autonomous driving sensor data that’s always on, even when Autopilot isn’t engaged, gives Tesla more data collection than any carmaker or otherwise, more than even Google with their “small” test fleet. AI/machine learning algorithms is being commoditized; data to train machine learning models then is the new oil for developing the best self driving system.

• “Competition was very slow to develop for Apple … By contrast, every major car company in the world intends to compete with TSLA in electric vehicles.”

Like, how GM is jumping in yelling “me first!” with the Chevy Bolt, trying to sell a mass market EV that’s selling less than Tesla is doing with their luxury EVs? What competition have ~500,000 deposits lined up with clear intent to buy?

Even discounting all the design, technology and Apple-esque cult following Tesla is enjoying. The biggest moat that even big carmakers have to start from scratch in overcoming, and pour profitless billions into, is in building their own batteries supply. No one on Earth have the batteries to supply any mass market EV right now. Tesla isn’t building Gigafactor(ies) for just fun and show.

• “Steve Jobs attracted and retained a senior team of loyal lieutenants who implemented his vision … Mr. Musk is a one-man show (and one distracted with many ventures at that).”

Don’t be jealous when the man can juggle so many balls.

And I look forward to seeing what Apple is really up to with self-driving EVs. There’s been too much smoke with their Project Titan for it to be vapor.

I see that you are off to a boring good start with your tunneling. Curious: how long is this test tunnel on your Instagram, and is it all under SpaceX campus land?

Your Boring Company got me thinking. Needing electric skates for every car on the road, cars which can move themselves, is not what I call efficient. Even considering your point of the skates is to cut diameter of single lane tunnels by half, part of the goal of a 10x cost reduction in tunnel boring (your TED talk). Since these skates will virtually slide on walls of these small tunnels, and cars cannot drive in such tunnels with no margin.

I see that what you are trying to achieve, is backloading cost away from initial tunnel construction, to build out and maintenance cost in all the skates and elevators to the surface. It is a brilliant strategy, as that’s the way to kickstart what is currently, mostly, inaction in massive tunnel boring for subways in order to solve the traffic problem at scale. Because tunnel boring right now cost too much (both money and time). Once the tunnels can provably be built with 10x less cost than currently, as you suggest, are politicians and investors going to say no to build the last bits of car skates and car elevators to solve the traffic problem?

But, why shuffle cars away from and back to the earth’s surface, when those cars can stay on the surface and continue driving around as they always do? Especially with the coming proliferation of self driving cars (SDC), car density per road surface will reduce or flatten until SDC approach saturation and urban density rise faster than SDC adoption. And SDCs can continue chauffeuring people around on the surface, not idling by staying away from traffic congestions, wherever they may still occur.

While it’s a grand idea to skip traffic by going underground, and re-emerge elsewhere in another part of the city where there’s no traffic jam, all while staying with your same car. It’s much cheaper to let tunnels serve its original design goal: as subways. There is of course the unromantic notion of needing to leave your surface-staying car, and whatever is in your trunk, to board passengers-only elevators down to the tunnels, and be transported in what would be high speed electric pods (in place of car skates). They would be effectively mini train cabins, able to move independently. And they would be only marginally more expensive in the larger scheme of things (and this is very large) than the car skates. But building these pods, a next-gen mass transit system, will have many benefits:

1. Whole fleets of electric pods that stay in the tunnels, multiplying total people and cargo carrying capacity in a given vertical “road space”
2. Pods can travel faster than the car skates, without carrying the weight of the car (only people and cargo)
3. Passenger pods can be designed optimally for a window-less, subterranean world. Since the tunnels will be relatively small in cross section, these pods can be completely circular to fit right inside these tunnels, maximizing cabin space. More space than cars would have. Cabin walls could be all screens, perhaps projecting realtime video feed of what’s vertically outside. The pods can thus be completely window-less without being claustrophobic, lowering material cost than otherwise while maintaining structural integrity
4. Cargo-only pods can transport goods efficiently to anywhere in the tunnels network, autonomously. Packages could be sucked up to buildings above, like the pneumatic tubes of old for mail? Or otherwise by robotics. This should help fuel Amazon’s money burning investment habits, AWS is currently making them temporarily profitable 😂
5. These cargo shafts, and passenger elevators at stops, can consume less road cutting real estate than the car skate equivalent, and can emerge on sidewalks instead of taking up road space
6. Passenger elevators, lifting say 10 or more people at a time, would have more vertical flow rate than lifting whole cars 1 at a time, with ~5 people in each. And far less weight lifting requirement to not need to lift a car, and EVs of the future are heavy with battery

In short, your Boring Company could do what SpaceX did for rockets by landing them: make what is currently unaffordable, affordable. Once the tunnels are built however, tunnels are better served as next generation, reimagined subways, not as car shuttles. The economics for tunnel dwelling high speed pods have clear new utility and so are much better than car skates, which serve no purpose since cars are perfectly suited to drive themselves.

Please re-consider planning for car skates, before you are too far along in your boring business. Let (self driving) cars stay on the roads, and pods take people places before rendezvousing with their cars later. People can always hop on someone else’s self driving car (on the Tesla Network for those with taste, naturally) if more surface driving is needed to reach destination.

Sincerely,

Gary and whoever signs this letter with a ❤️, wanting your boring business to be insanely great

PS. Discussion on Facebook

Update (Feb. 12, 2018):

👆🏼WonderSwipe (previously named AAG) has launched! It’s available now for free on the App Store. We made it work, rethinking the whole search experience to be 10–100x faster. I believe it’s the biggest thing for search since Google. Read about it here, watch our 30s demo video for how, and subscribe to updates here.

In my time with isoHunt for 11 years, I’ve fought 2 lawsuits. One from Hollywood studios in the US and one from CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Ass.), aka. Music Canada. During this time, up to isoHunt’s shutdown in 2013, I promised that I’d protect isoHunt users’ rights and privacy in not disclosing any user data such as email and IP addresses in legal discovery from plaintiffs, which might be used for trolling and extortion.

After 10 years (2006–2016), I’m happy to announce the end of isoHunt’s and my lawsuits — as seen on our consent orders at the Supreme Court of BC, just jointly filed with CRIA. I can proudly conclude that I’ve kept my word regarding users’ privacy above. To isoHunt’s avid users, it’s worth repeating since I shutdown isoHunt in 2013, that you have my sincerest thanks for your continued support. Me and my staff could not have done it for more than 10 years without you, and that’s an eternity in internet time. It was an interesting and challenging journey for me to say the least, and the most profound business learning experience I could not expect.

I want to thank my lawyers who have defended me through these years. Ira Rothken, my counsel on the US MPAA case — and Arthur Grant, my counsel on the Canadian CRIA case. I wouldn’t have survived without you.

And I want to congratulate both Hollywood and CRIA on their victories, in letting me off with fines of $110m and $66m, respectively. Thank you! Here’s to progress, and me leaving my life of one innovative hobby to… something else? As I’ve realized through the years, there are many industries to disrupt with internet software besides the media industry.

To that end, I’d like to present to you my next idea I’m working on after isoHunt:

AAG! (App to Automate Googling)

My passion has and always will be in technology, in how it can transform the way we work, learn, eat, live, communicate and be entertained. As “googling” became as common a verb as kleenex has become synonymous to tissues, I don’t need to sell you how world changing the internet and search is, in disseminating knowledge, ideas and culture.

And yet, with the rise of smartphones becoming the dominant computing device in terms of time spent, I see doing non-trivial search on mobile devices slow and tedious.

A non-trivial search is what I’d define from here on as any search for which you can’t find a quick answer within the top 3 results.

I find myself long-pressing links to open new browser tabs in background, while I go back and forth in browser histories referencing bits of information to collate an answer to my questions. True AI like the Star Trek computer carries the promise of machine-learning computers which gather, understand and cross-reference networked information, so our questions can be directly answered, succinctly and insightfully. But AI isn’t there yet. The signal to noise ratio can be low for more opinionated searches in topics such as researching your vacation, or what is the EU.

Currently, switching browser tabs in desktop and (perhaps) tablet browsers is a lot faster than on smartphones, but the back and forth process isn’t any less tedious or inefficient.

I feel that the current search experience on mobile devices is often broken for anything non-trivial. Stats have shown that smartphone users generally don’t bother searching or browsing the Web much at all, perhaps because many websites aren’t designed for mobile? Do you spend most of your smartphone time inside apps, tailored for specific usage or industry? Would you or do you already use a mobile app designed for searching and researching the Web, making the experience more streamlined and enjoyable? I want your thoughts and comments as I further develop my idea and app. If you too find the mobile search experience slow and tedious as I do (not counting trivial searches), like this post and let me know in the form below!

For exactly how my app works, I want to show, not tell. Please signup here to try my app I’m for now code naming AAG, to get an early look at what it’s about. Until I think of a better name, maybe as clever as isoHunt.

P.S. This is my first post on Medium. I’m fond of its UI design with side-notes and the writing format. I plan on getting back to writing more since my hiatus after I shutdown isoHunt and its frontpage, which has been more or less my blog.

Disclaimer: Beware of my hidden sarcasm from time to time. I’ve been told it’s often not as obvious as I thought.

For reporters and media inquiries, you can find me on Twitter and Facebook, or shoot me an email to the first letter of my first name + four letters of my last name, at me.com.