Why we read the web ourselves instead of renting search results

Most AI products that answer from the web sit on somebody else's search API. It works, and it is the sensible way to start. But it decides three things for you: they set the rate limit, they decide what is in the index, and they can change the terms.

We took the other route and read the web ourselves into an index we hold. How that works: https://askfinz.com/how-the-index-works

Two consequences are the reason it was worth the trouble.

First, records keep their type. A regulatory filing comes back as a filing with its period and its filer, a judgment as a judgment with its citation, a standard with its clause — rather than being flattened into pages that happen to contain your words: https://askfinz.com/collections

Second, documents get read rather than linked to. PDFs, Office files and slide decks are converted and read page by page, which is where a lot of the genuinely useful material on the web actually lives.

How the crawler behaves: https://askfinz.com/crawler

If you want the sceptical version, the comparison table puts our published rate next to everyone else's and names where the other product is genuinely better: https://askfinz.com/web-index/best-web-index-for-ai

Happy to answer questions about any of it.