I tried to daily drive it last week and found it pretty hard. Certain day-to-day searches would be completely nonsensical results.

For specific use cases, especially with optics on, it works well. I’m definitely keeping an eye on it and will be trying it again in the future.

I’m really intrigued by the decision to create their own index, which already sounds pretty helpful (especially if it gives people the ability to create their own). From the looks of it, the engine is also truly hackable compared to, say, DuckDuckGo (just look at the Manage Optics settings page). The fact you can already use it to search Fediverse and a small but curated list of IndieWeb sites creates the opportunity to discover things.

(That latter part also means it might compete with other engines that tout an IndieWeb index as their only exclusive feature, and require an account and money, and might pass that money along to an unsavory crypto-bro.)

This might not be the search engine to find exactly what you want, but it does fill the niche of helping democratize the internet, alongside other engines like Marginalia.

No educated answer:

You can rate and block results which is very useful. They have a matrix room and the similar site search is cool.

@Whooping_Seal Is it different in any way than, say, YaCy?

not trustworthy juat yet, we will see in the long term