ai-search-engine
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Phind Gave Coders the Answer. Then It Vanished.
Phind turned the web's scattered documentation into useful, cited answers for developers. Its brief run also became a neat lesson in how quickly a focused AI product can be copied, crowded out, and switched off.
Liner
Liner is an AI search engine built for students, researchers, and knowledge workers who need answers they can trust. Founded in 2012 as a web highlighter and rebuilt around large language models after GPT-3, the company now serves roughly 12 million monthly users across more than 200 countries, pairing conversational answers with transparent citations from academic papers and vetted sources. Headquartered in San Francisco with roots in Seoul, Liner positions itself as a source-grounded alternative to general chatbots and to Google's search box.
James Reilly
James Reilly is the co-founder and CEO of Latent Knowledge, a New York based AI company behind LitView, a semantic search engine that maps and clusters technical literature in 3D so researchers can find related work across disciplines instead of hunting database by database. A West Point life-science researcher with a background spanning psychology, physiology and education, Reilly built LitView after noticing how often ideas in unrelated fields quietly overlap. The platform has been trialed at West Point, Harvard Graduate School of Education, the University of Geneva and King's College London, and Latent Knowledge struck a co-selling partnership with Microsoft in 2022.
Consensus
Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that lets anyone ask a research question in plain language and get answers drawn directly from peer-reviewed science. Instead of returning a list of blue links, it reads across more than 200 million papers, summarizes findings, and shows - via its signature Consensus Meter - how much the published literature agrees. Founded in 2021 by Eric Olson and Christian Salem, the company is building what it calls an AI operating system for researchers, used by millions of students, scientists, clinicians and curious people.
Eric Olson
Eric Olson is the co-founder and CEO of Consensus, an AI search engine that pulls evidence-based answers out of more than 200 million peer-reviewed scientific papers. A former Northwestern University offensive lineman who became a data scientist at DraftKings, Olson built Consensus with his college teammate Christian Salem so that ordinary people would not feel like outsiders to science. The company launched publicly in 2022 and raised an $11.5M Series A in 2024 led by Union Square Ventures, with backing from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.