Ten things we forgot to be true

1. The user's goal is the only goal that matters.

If you find what you need in five seconds, we've succeeded. No dark patterns to keep you clicking. No engagement metrics. When you leave fast, we win.

2. Doing one thing well beats doing ten things poorly.

Just search. No ecosystem. No platform lock-in. One search box, ten blue links, done. No shopping carousels. No widgets fighting for attention. No AI hallucinations pretending to be answers.

3. Speed isn't a feature. Speed is respect.

Modern search loads a dozen frameworks before showing results. We ship HTML and links. Fast is respect for your time.

4. Show sources, not summaries.

Search should send you to sources, not replace them. You deserve full context, to judge credibility yourself, and to support the creators who made the information. No AI-generated answers that blend fact and fiction. No synthesized nonsense that sounds confident but has no source.

5. Privacy isn't negotiable.

You don't need to be tracked for search to work. No cross-site tracking. No data sales. Your searches disappear when you close the tab.

6. Subscriptions align incentives better than ads.

You pay us, we serve you. No split loyalty. No advertisers to appease. No slow enshittification as we chase revenue at your expense.

7. Search should get simpler, not more complex.

Every year added features nobody asked for. We're stripping it back down. Search box. Results. Nothing else.

8. The open web needs defending.

We link to actual websites and drive traffic to creators. If it's not accessible via a public URL, it's not in our results. No SEO spam farms. No content mill garbage optimized for algorithms instead of humans.

9. Honesty beats optimization.

Simple, transparent ranking. Relevance, recency, authority. No black-box algorithms. No paid placement. Just honest ranking of what matches your query.

10. We won't scale into the problem we're solving.

kgrep will stay focused, stay small, stay aligned with users. The moment we forget why we started is the moment we should shut down.