Introducing Scout

The World’s next great search engine. www.scout.click

Hi, Medium. My name is Jeff Hunt. I’m the founder of Scout. I’d like to tell you about it today and try to get you interested, if you’re not already interested, in search engines and why they’re so important, andhow they can be better than they are today.

(This article was partially transcribed from a review of founder Jeff Hunt and the video is also available here. To follow Scout’s launch please join our facebook page or mailing list).

Search engines are incredibly important — one of the most important utilities, or platforms, or services in the world today. It affects everything around us — culture, business, politics, and commerce. If you’ve never thought about it much, I’d like you to consider what could be better about search? At Scout, that’s what we’re obsessed with. There are a lot of flaws. Maybe you’ve heard of some of the criticisms of search these days. Privacy is one of the things that you hear about. But there’s a lot more to improve on then just that.

Initially, Scout started at a Makerspace that I run. I started it for kids to teach kids coding and other things, 3D printing, young engineering projects.

One of the projects that I started to think about was search for kids, and that’s kind of how it got started, trying to make a better search engine for kids. Then we sort of continued on from there. I have a background in search. I used to work for Google. So, I became sort of a serial entrepreneur after working at Google and have done a lot of crazy projects. Built a wireless network in Rwanda and started the Makerspace, like I mentioned. I’m a writer. I’m an artist and a Maker (www.jeffhuntwriter.com).

Scout is the latest in a long series of projects, and basically, the nature of it is we’ve been building a next-generation search engine that has organic results, that allows users to curate the index (which is the list of results you get when you search for something) and to move toward an open-source search engine that would be owned by the public eventually.

So, there’s a ton of things to innovate on. And I felt like, at some point, that everyone’s sort of just asleep and using search and not really giving it much thought, but actually there’s a ton of work to do. So, I guess, I felt like maybe I should be the one who started to try to do that or at least get people excited about it.

So, that’s the nature of Scout. We’re trying to have a more innovative search engine than what you see today. That’s one of the fun parts about this project: getting to say things to people that makes you sound just completely crazy like, “We’re going to be beat Google,” and having people just look at you, but I can make a pretty good case for it. If I can’t make a case for the “how,” I can make a case for the “why.” People need to be thinking about search. It’s really important, and there’s a long way to go in making search as good as it can be.

People who back Scout’s launch will be really important to the project. Not just the dollars, but also the community and also your intelligence and your background. By that, I mean, that Scout is trying to. . .well, let’s put it like this: Currently, with search engines, if you want to be the first and most important result, there’s just two ways. One is that you pay for the privilege. You have an ad that you paid for. The second thing is that you know all about the ins and outs of SEO, and you know how to game the system. You know how to, one way or another, get up there in those rankings.

Then, of course, you can be selected by a private company who decides, without letting the world know, what this ranking system is. For example, Google — what they let people know is that it’s mostly based on popularity. Well, that can be the best way sometimes, but also there’s times that the most popular answer isn’t the right answer. In fact, there’s a lot more people who are experts who are in the minority than in the majority.

So, for the first time, what we’re trying to do is, amongst other things, is give people a chance to affect the index and curate the index, or we can call it reviewing or crowd-ranking. So that if an index result is reviewed and chosen by people who are also authenticated and known to be, for example, not a bot, then those kinds of things will be rewarded and give a new way for results to be indexed. There are things like this that work really well. They’re just not applied to search yet, where people annotate knowledge and are the gatekeepers of it altogether, for example, wikis and things like that.

Basically, what we need to do is, one of the things that’s important also is tackling the issue of privacy and identity is another huge part of the project. There’s a lot of complaints about privacy, but they’re also not a real, actual, fair conversation going on about it because both sides are wrong. In the sense that you have these providers that claim to provide a free service. But of course, we all know nothing’s free, but you have users anyway on the other end who don’t want to pay for a service.

Which leads to kind of an ambiguous and dishonest model, which is advertising paid-for services. Advertising is a conduit that leads to privacy issues because people want to know about you first to sell stuff or get your attention. Then once they have this powerful tool or they can know stuff about you for selling stuff, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump before they want to know about you for whatever. What we’re trying to make people understand that very unpopular argument that things are not free, unfortunately.

And it’s bad for our culture. There’s a lot of benefits to moving away from the “freedumb” model on the internet. One of those is that by people paying for say, an account solves a lot of problems on the web. There’s a lot of crime in the problem. There’s a lot of fraud. There’s a lot any kind of monkey business you can think of where people and bots and things like this and free accounts. But a lot of that goes away when you have to get out your wallet to create an account.

Basically at Scout, we’d like you to know that there’s a culture behind it that is steeped in these things. We’re obsessed with improving computing and culture associated with it. Search is a really important project, so of course, that’s one of the things that we’re interested in. It’s for me alone, like I said, a project in a long series of projects like this. I built a network in Rwanda. I built a Makerspace for kids. I built a free wireless network in my hometown. I built software products and also started a made-to-order business with locally manufactured goods.

I mentioned all that, just to say that we have an experience in taking a dream and actually making something out of it. So, it wouldn’t be the first time that we talk some kind of crazy talk like this and actually come up with something. I’m going to take a break for a second.

[INTERVIEWER]: It was great. Everything was great, and I’m just taking some notes.

[JEFF HUNT]: Sure.

[INTERVIEWER]: So that way, we can get more sound bites. Will you briefly talk about, say, the internet, and you can take a break?

[JEFF HUNT]: No, no, no. It’s literally — if you have something. I was just kind of —

[INTERVIEWER]: The internet in Rwanda.

[JEFF HUNT]: Yeah.

[INTERVIEWER]: So, tell it like a story. What were the obstacles?

[JEFF HUNT]: Right, right.

[INTERVIEWER]: Let’s just go into that.

[JEFF HUNT]: Okay.

[INTERVIEWER]: First, how did you end up there? What inspired you?

[JEFF HUNT]: I can tell this story totally easily.

[INTERVIEWER]: Okay.

[JEFF HUNT]: The internet service that we started in Rwanda is an example project. The way that happened was a number of years ago when there wasn’t ubiquitous broadband, I was contacted by The Union Pacific Railroad, which is in a quarry. The tracks run through a quarry out here in New Braunfels, Texas, and they needed internet service in the quarry, which they didn’t have, or they had really poor internet service.

So, when I used to work at Google, I had built a long-distance wireless link between the two campuses or participated in that. That was my first introduction to that sort of thing. I remembered that, and I figured out some hardware that would make a long-distance link. I put one on top of the whole movie theater in New Braunfels, one on top of a billboard in the South end of town, and then one that had line of sight down to the quarry. So, that was very fun and worked. It’s great. They were my first internet service customer.

Then the Municipal Airport contacted me, and they needed cameras installed across the tarmac. They were a mile or whatever. So, the same thing figured it out with the wireless, connected the cameras. So, then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I made a network that was free in town, and the reason I made it free is I didn’t want the pressure of charging people yet until I knew what it was doing. But made a free network, kind of many billboards, put these wireless repeaters in all of them, and had three New Braunfels Wi-Fi, it was called. I got a lot of phone calls from all these people asking to get it. They thought I worked for the city and stuff like that.

Anyway, so one day I was talking to somebody who was selling me some of the parts, and I said, “You know, I’ve learned a lot about this, and if there’s ever someplace you needed somebody to go to as a consultant to build this kind of network, I’ll go anywhere. And they said, “You’ll go anywhere?” I was like, “Yeah, I’ll go anywhere.” He said, “Will you go to Rwanda?” And I was like, “Oh, that is anywhere.”

So, Rwanda, of course, is famous from the Civil War. That happened there, ghastly Civil War, but that had been a few years since then. It was more or less normal, I was told. I went over there, and it was incredible. I loved the people. It was an incredible challenge. I met some people, did the project, then went over there before I met some people later on, and said, “Let’s start a company. Let’s build like a really big mesh wireless network.”

So, the challenges in Kigali, Rwanda is well, many things, but power going off all the time during the day, negotiating where to put the equipment, which ended up being mostly on the rooftops of businesses and homes. Many, many things. Everything kind of takes forever there. It’s not easy, but we did it. It was an incredible experience, and I learned a lot about the people there, who are really impressive people. So yeah, that was the Rwanda experiment.

[INTERVIEWER]: Awesome. Let’s talk about just whatever you want to share about your experience when you were working with Google.

[JEFF HUNT]: Sure. So, I used to work for Google. It seems like a million years ago. I moved out to California when I was in my early twenties or mid-twenties. I worked for Dell before that. I’m from Texas, but I lived here my whole life, but I eventually wanted to move out to California. I moved out there, did a few little different jobs. Then I somehow got contacted by Google. I think I maybe had hired a headhunter or something like that, and I got contacted by Google.

Google has a fascinating way of hiring people, and I must admit, it was one of my favorite things about Google is learning this alternative way to run a business. This is when Google was just starting. So, I’d have to say to people then who very cool, and it was a lot of really smart people in an incredible, fun, environment, at least at the beginning.

Basically, what happened was I lived in Monterey, California, and I wasn’t ready to move to Mountain View yet until I was hired officially by Google. So, I commuted there every day, an hour and a half each way. I worked 12-hour days there and would do all kinds of stuff. It was very cool. No paperwork, people just grab you and drag you where you’re supposed to be when there’s an emergency and this kind of stuff.

So, I think I was like the 80th-something person to work there. I was a contractor, but an early person working there. The hiring process was fascinating when I initially got hired, and I always felt like they hired me a little bit because they found out that I was commuting. I felt like they were kind of like, “Wow, this guy’s really going to show up no matter what.” Basically, the hiring process was just meeting many people that work there and walking around with them around and talking about all kinds of things. It was really an amazing experience, and I’ll always being thankful that I had such an incredible learning experience there at Google.

[INTERVIEWER]: Is there any specific problems that you addressed or that you worked on that you can share?

[JEFF HUNT]: Yeah. So, some of my duties at Google. I really, when I was working there, like a lot of like, hopefully, most people when they’re really young. I was really hungry to do anything, and I was constantly learning. It was a great environment for that. If you wanted to learn everything you could about Linux, well, guess what? This guy over here, he’s only too happy to tell you all about Linux all the time.

So, I was doing that. I was an administrator. I worked in the data centers. I helped scan The Library of Congress, and that was a huge project. That was the first time anything like that had been done. I supported the remote offices. So, that would be like getting woken up by people in Japan and stuff like that. Networking, mostly supporting internal projects. Network administration. It was a very startup environment at that point. So, it was kind of like working with engineering, working with operations, working with marketing, working with — the entire company working together, and all knowing one another.

[INTERVIEWER]: Cool. Okay, and then let’s just talk a little bit about the program for kids at the Makerspace.

[JEFF HUNT]: Yeah.

[INTERVIEWER]: If you could start with what’s important and why with all of that.

[JEFF HUNT]: Yeah. So, the New Braunfels Makerspace was like this very fatiguing dream that I came up with. I say “fatiguing” in that I was so determined to do this, and at a point where if you’ve heard of this sort of thing, now, most people hadn’t. Then, it was very difficult to find how to work out all the particulars of being able to get a place, to get the equipment. How would it work? How would people understand what you’re even doing? And stuff like that.

But the thing that kept me really going about it, kind of like Scout, was that it wasn’t just driven by a technical desire. It was also a social desire. For example, my kids were very little when I started that, and anyone could clearly see that children all over the Earth were disappearing, and where were they? They were in their homes by themselves, looking at some kind of screen, you know? Some people might feel different ways about that, but I felt like there was improvement to be made in that.

To me, something that was really close to me was that my son, unlike me, when I was a kid, was not interested in sports. He doesn’t want to chase a ball around at all. He thinks it’s dumb. He’s probably right. There was a lot of kids, and this ended up being why the Makerspace was successful. A lot of kids who were smart, but not really fitting into the mainstream activities. These smart kids, also known as the future. Probably the most rewarding thing has been parents coming up to me and saying, “I’m so glad I found this thing because we’ve tried everything. We tried karate. We tried baseball. We tried ballet, whatever.

The Makerspace, what it’s really about, it’s about challenging gaming and consumer electronics as an activity and trying to find, for kids, a better outlet for their technical desire. Not watching 18 hours of YouTube videos a day but making things. Moving from consumer to producer. At the very least, coding their own games, and also, being social. Finding people like them and working as a team, as opposed to being in their room alone, just with strangers on the internet that they may never meet in person.

So, to me, it’s really meaningful, and it’s a lot like The Scout Project in the sense that it’s not just a technical issue. It’s an actual social and cultural issue. I’ll be blunt. When I worked at Google and before that, and when I got involved, like an early person getting involved with the internet and understanding it and everything from I used to get a cell phone and hack into phone lines and get online that way and all kinds of stuff. It’s not really become quite what I thought it would be. That’s what happens with everything that’s invented, but I think there’s a lot to reconsider about our culture. Everything from gross over computing to addiction to the way we behave online.

The two projects have a lot in common with what we’re trying to do. That’s where part of the motivation is. It’s to be a better person in a technical world. To not just have technology, to be better at technology, but to be master of technology. To have it work for us, and us be better for it. I use that term “gross over computing” because, really, the nature of computing is that it should make things easier for you. It should take some terrible thing that you don’t want to do and do it and take care of it in a very efficient, very minimal way. Then you’d be better off for it. What I see is the reverse. I see people almost serving these platforms and serving these brands, and so it’s an opinion, but that’s where Scout is coming from.

[INTERVIEWER]: All right, and then if you can, let’s go through like a bullet list again. Now, you did this earlier, but a bullet list of the things that Scout was going to address.

[JEFF HUNT]: Right. Yeah. So, another important feature of Scout is improving privacy, perfecting privacy. This is a fascinating issue going on where privacy and identity are all over the place in people’s concerns. The thing is that there is a time for privacy. There’s also a time for identity. If you think about it, for example, to drive a car on the road, we have to prove our identity. We have to prove that we’ve done some reasonable maintenance on our vehicle, and nobody’s arguing with that.

There are some people on the web that want complete anonymity. I’m not really sure that makes total sense. It’s also very difficult on any kind of network, just like keeping a secret. We’d like to get that message out. We don’t know, totally, the right answer, but I think that there’s a time for people to prove who they are, share who they are, and that can really qualify what they say. For example, you might buy a lot more things on Amazon if there are a million reviews versus somebody you don’t really know who they are. It doesn’t say where they work or what country they’re in.

People still have to live by the laws of the land, so sometimes the web has become this strange kind of place where people are expecting an unreal amount of anonymity. Now, with that said, people should know exactly where they are not anonymous, and that’s where the model right now of people not realizing that their privacy is being compromised is the issue.

To me then, something we want to improve on is to quit trying to solve these issues with legal means, because it’s not really fair to people. Especially if you’re not a corporation with lawyers to be asked to go into a legal contract about privacy when also maybe you don’t understand it, maybe you don’t have time to understand it. What we’re really after is an engineering solution. For example, instead of having you click on a silly cookie agreement on every website, you go to. Having you see in the user interface, what cookies are used, and what for. Things like that, I think, would be a really big improvement for the world. I think the whole legal tack is silly.

Another feature that I’m really trying to get into the mix is to run, hopefully, the world’s most successful cryptocurrency experiment by tokenizing search. It will hopefully get it into mainstream. Grandmothers and grandfathers, who would maybe never have a wallet, will get a wallet just by searching with Scout. When they contribute to the search engine by reviewing a site, for example, or asking a question or answering a question, they get a token. Hopefully, we can get more people involved in that in the whole cryptocurrency experiment. Before it fails because it’s in a closed-loop right now of speculators, and that’s just only going to go so far.

Another important feature is to give people organic results. There’s never any easy method, it’s always difficult to be a gatekeeper of information, but at least the system should be open. For example, if you go into the library and nobody feels ripped off that they’re in the Z section. Everybody knows it’s got to be something. But with search, there’s a lot of issues. If you just think about it, having one company fairly privately control what is prioritized. That’s not the ideal. So, we’re trying to give people an improved and more democratic, more organic list of results.

[INTERVIEWER]: So, earlier, we were talking about privacy. We were talking about like authenticating, right?

[JEFF HUNT]: Yeah.

[INTERVIEWER]: And why is that important?

[JEFF HUNT]: Okay. So, for example Scout Jr. The whole way this got started: it’s incredibly frustrating to me that I can’t sit my child, or you can’t sit your child down in front of a computer. One of the most useful knowledge instruments in the history of the world. You can’t because you’re turning them loose amongst strangers, and it’s not regulated the way it should be and on and on. So that would be a really good example. Proof of age would be a huge improvement.

One of the things we’re trying to tackle the different technical solutions that would make a search engine safer and better for a child. It’s a huge project that, strangely, the whole world is almost mainly asleep on, and that includes legislation and companies. For example, domain registrars, perhaps from the beginning, should have used domain name suffixes and actually made them actually match the content. For example, .edu should literally be edu, .com should be commerce, .xxx should be so forth, and you can’t access that unless you’re of age.

Besides age-appropriate improvements for Scout Jr., we’re trying to get people interested in search and to become more knowledgeable search engine users. As it is right now when people Google something, a miracle happens, and nobody cares. Because the user interface doesn’t really teach anybody. Nobody’s learned anything more about search from Google or anybody else than they knew when they started. A lot of people probably do just want their results, but there would be nothing wrong with people in the background becoming more aware of what’s happening because it’s just important, in my opinion.

So, those are some of the things that if you need anybody to sit still long enough about search engines, the important thing is we all need to start thinking about because people laugh and it’s difficult to say. But I’m telling everyone, Google’s a dinosaur right now. It is, and some things become a dinosaur. They stay around forever because they have such a hold on the market. Southwestern Bell or whatever and gauging people and stuff like that. It’s just a question of what people want to do instead, or if anything, so.

[INTERVIEWER]: All right. Now, what I want you to do is just describe the kind of person who uses Scout.

[JEFF HUNT]: Right.

[INTERVIEWER]: So just adjectives. One-word adjectives, two, three-word adjectives, just —

[JEFF HUNT]: Right. Okay. So, curious, bored, expert, adventurous, dreamer, crank, privacy issues, cryptocurrency, political, savvy. Yeah.

[INTERVIEWER]: All right. Let’s see.

This article was transcribed from a review of founder Jeff Hunt and the video is also available here. To follow Scout’s launch please join our facebook page or mailing list.