Scry, programmable internet search w/ congestion pricing

Meet Scry, a 500 TB NVMe internet index in ClickHouse that you can run ~arbitrary readonly SQL and some of Datalog over, and I handle the problem of resource-contention with congestion-based micro-auction pricing. When there's capacity, the service is free for non-commercial use.---Hello. It's 2026, we're training simulated fruit fly brains to play Beat Saber, do we still have to be stuck with internet (re)search as fn: natural language -> black box we can't do anything about -> ranked_list/summary?There is a long history of people trying to do very fancy things that end up being done in relational databases and a little SQL. There is a gravity to them, a bitter lesson, just like scaling of generalized ml training methods. I mean many, many information products can be built off essentially giant real-time OLAP databases and frontier LLMs writing brilliant SQL+Datalog+vector+Jev etc. queries.Google Search, Tavily, Exa essentially have the problem of mapping your agents' context you are willing to provide, to a tiny subset of their index. You pay a fixed cost to an extremely hard problem that has a distribution of hardness, which means YOU eat the downsides when they are running out of budgeted compute to help you out.Their algorithms are opaque to the caller, there's really not much user control, and there's not a serious opportunity to communally improve search recipes, like the lexical+Jev recipes you trust to select bleeding edge AI builders.Furthermore, search companies aren't even pursuing text-to-SQL anymore (several have talked to me)... they made up their minds during the traumatic 2024 text-to-sql days. They were just too early.I hope you enjoy. I'm intent on scaling this paradigm on differentiated hardware over much more data, so any compelling use cases or queries I could show off, would be much appreciated!

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FL score

62

out of 100

Verdict

VALIDATE

high confidence

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A SQL-queryable internet index with dynamic pricing that targets power users frustrated with opaque search APIs, but faces adoption friction and unclear advantages over existing tools.

The pain

AI researchers, data engineers, and agents need to search the internet programmatically with control over ranking logic and query strategy, but existing APIs like Google Search and Tavily are black boxes with fixed pricing that doesn't match the actual cost distribution of queries.

The gap

No one offers a queryable internet index where you write SQL to express what you actually want, though the gap is smaller than it appears because most users don't want to write SQL and ClickHouse instances exist for those who do.

Build angle

Start by proving the index works for a specific use case like AI research paper discovery or financial news analysis, charge per query to fund the infrastructure, and only expand to congestion pricing once you have enough concurrent users to make it meaningful.

Strengths

  • Founder understands the technical architecture and has thought through the pricing mechanism
  • Real frustration exists with black-box search APIs among AI builders and researchers
  • SQL is a proven interface for complex queries that users understand
  • Congestion pricing is economically sound and aligns incentives better than flat fees

Risks

  • Keeping a 500 TB index fresh requires constant crawling and deduplication, which is operationally expensive and hard to differentiate
  • Most potential users will default to free Google Search or pay for Tavily rather than learn to write SQL queries
  • The index needs to be significantly better or fresher than what competitors have to justify switching costs
  • Chicken-and-egg problem: need users to fund the index, need a good index to attract users
  • The congestion pricing model is clever but adds complexity and may confuse early customers
  • Text-to-SQL has real limitations and the founder acknowledges search companies abandoned it for good reasons

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