What you get
It is not just a search box.
Winnowry opens on a single quiet field, and most days that is all you need. Behind it are seven more places, each one built around the same idea: your things stay yours, the machine does the work, and everything it learns about you is used for you and nobody else.
Search
Ask in plain language. Winnowry works out what you meant, searches the real web in your own words, throws away the ads and the filler, and writes you one clear answer with every fact linked to where it came from — and when the web does not actually have a good answer, it tells you so. Everyday things — the time, a conversion, the weather, a band’s tour dates — come back instantly as a card, worked out on your machine or pulled from one clean source, with no web search at all. Switch to images or video and you get a grid instead of an answer, from engines you can name.
Research
For questions too big for one search. Winnowry breaks the question into parts, works through them, follows what it finds, and comes back with something written and cited — a comparison, a survey of what changed, a decision laid out. You watch every step and stop it the moment you have enough. Where the sources do not answer a part of your question, it says which part rather than filling the gap. And because it knows you, the research is about you: the bike you already ride, the car you actually drive, the things you care about in a purchase.
Your library
Everything you keep — answers worth saving, pages you liked, your own notes and margin notes, transcripts, and any folder you have shared with it — is searchable, and it is searched before the web is. A document keeps its shape, and an answer cites the line it came from. When your own material answers the question, nothing leaves your machine at all. Winnowry only ever knows what you have handed it — it never goes looking through your computer on its own.
Reference on this machine
Add a whole reference work to the machine — the entirety of Wikipedia is one — and Winnowry consults it exactly as it reads a web page, citations and all. It looks there before it asks any search engine, so a plane, a cabin or a network you would rather not trust stops being a problem — and so does an ordinary question you would rather no engine saw. Nothing downloads on its own: Winnowry tells you what one costs in disk before it starts, and you can delete it whenever you want the space back. Anything that depends on now — a price, a score — skips the reference and goes to the web.
The collective
Pair with your other machine, your household or a few people you trust, and what one of you has already answered, fetched or kept is there for everyone: a reference held on one machine, searched from another; this morning’s weather, fetched once; a page somebody kept, found by the person who needed it. Machines talk to each other directly, with no server of ours in between. Sharing is off until you turn it on, item by item, you can take it back in one press, and what travels is attributed to the collective — never to the person who kept it.
Calendar & reminders
Winnowry knows what week it is and what you have coming, so “next Tuesday” means the right day and a question about your trip knows when the trip is. You can hand it a reminder in the middle of a sentence and it will keep it. It reads your week to answer your questions — it does not send invitations or reschedule anything on your behalf.
Every language, not just English
Most of what has been written down is not in English, and an English search engine only shows you the part that is. Winnowry asks your question in other languages too — as a matter of course, not only when you ask about somewhere else — translating it back to check itself before anything is sent, and reading the results in whatever language they come in. Where a language has an independent index of its own, that is what gets asked: Seznam, Naver, Baidu, Yandex, Search.ch. More as we find real indexes behind them.
From your phone
Your phone is a window onto the machine at home — your library, your answers, your own search, on the device you actually have in your hand. Nothing is relayed through us, because there is nothing of ours in between: the phone talks to your computer and to nowhere else, which is the part no cloud assistant can offer you at any price. Today that window opens on your own network. Next it opens from anywhere — an encrypted link straight to your own machine, still with nobody in the middle.
Two things worth knowing
The parts nobody advertises.
- It asks engines that crawl the web themselvesMojeek, Purili, mwmbl, searchmysite — indexes built by their own crawlers rather than resold from somebody else’s. It is the difference between a second opinion and a second copy, and it is why Winnowry surfaces pages the usual results never show you.
- It rebuilds the pages, not just the answersFollow a source and Winnowry can show you that page rebuilt — the writing, the pictures, the structure, with the ads, pop-ups, newsletter walls and tracking stripped out, and the links still working so you stay in the clean version. The door back to the original web is always right there.
The one thing to know before you turn on the lock. If you turn on the at-rest lock and lose the passphrase, nobody can recover your data for you — including us. There is no cloud backdoor, which is what makes the lock real. So it hands you a recovery key the moment you turn it on, and offers to save it into the password manager you already use.
One quiet field, and everything behind it.
Join the waitlist for one note when it opens.