Disrupting Search: Free Spoke Challenges Google with Privacy Focus

About the Guest(s):

Kristin Jackson is the CEO and co-founder of Free Spoke, a pioneering search engine that is dedicated to user privacy and presenting balanced viewpoints. With a robust professional history in technology and entrepreneurship, Kristin has collaborated with her co-founder Todd Ricketts to establish a platform that offers unique search solutions. Her work focuses on challenging the conventional models of internet search by fostering transparency and integrity in the digital age.

Episode Summary:

In this fabulous episode of Talking Shizzle, host Taylor Wilson interviews Kristin Jackson, CEO and co-founder of Free Spoke, a revolutionary search engine that offers privacy-focused solutions and balanced viewpoints. As they dive into Kristin's journey of creating a search engine to compete against the Goliath that is Google, Kristin explains the fundamental differences that Free Spoke brings to the world of digital search. Emphasizing their steadfast commitment to user privacy, showing diverse perspectives, and offering a pornography-free environment, Kristin highlights the significance of integrity in today's technological landscape.

The conversation with Kristin Jackson explores the entrepreneurial venture of building a search engine that contrasts with major players like Google and DuckDuckGo. Drawing on insights into AI and emerging trends in search technologies, Kristin underscores Free Spoke's dedication to provide a more ethical and user-centric internet experience. The episode also delves into their future initiatives, including a kid-specific browser to protect young users. Throughout the dialogue, Kristin sheds light on how Free Spoke navigates the complexities of the tech industry by adhering strictly to privacy and unbiased content, reiterating the importance of genuine debate and diverse opinions in shaping a well-informed public.

Key Takeaways:

• Free Spoke is committed to protecting user privacy, ensuring anonymity in searches and never selling user data.
• The platform distinguishes itself by showing both left and right perspectives on search topics, helping users avoid echo chambers.
• Free Spoke offers a pornography-free search environment, acknowledging the impact of such content on societal issues like sex trafficking and child protection.
• The discussion includes insights into the evolving role of AI in search engines and how Free Spoke plans to integrate these technologies while maintaining its core principles.
• Kristin Jackson emphasizes the importance of this debate for personal and societal growth, drawing from historical examples and applying these insights to present-day digital challenges.

Resources:

• Free Spoke Website: freespoke.com
• Contact Kristin Jackson: kristin@freespoke.com

Discover an insightful conversation that delves into the complexities of the modern digital information space. The episode encourages listeners to think critically about the platforms they use and urges them to explore Free Spoke for a balanced search experience. Be sure to tune in for more discussions that challenge the status quo and champion innovative thinking on the Talking Shizzle podcast.

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Transcript

0:00:03 Taylor Wilson: Hey, hey, hey, all you lovely people out there. 

0:00:07 Taylor Wilson: I know you’ve got a lot going on in your day and you have big dreams for your brand. 

0:00:12 Taylor Wilson: Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from entrepreneurs, leaders, change makers and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Wilson, founder of Creative Shizzle, and I’m stoked to bring. 

0:00:29 Taylor Wilson: You a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle today. This show is all about helping you. 

0:00:36 Taylor Wilson: Think differently so that you could grow. 

0:00:39 Taylor Wilson: Your business or your cause. 

0:00:42 Taylor Wilson: Check us out on the web at creativeShizzle.com now let’s get into it and talk some shizzle. 

0:00:51 Taylor Wilson: Hey, hey. We are on a new episode of Talking Shizzle. I’m super excited to talk to Kristen Jackson today. Hey, Kristen, what’s up? 

0:00:58 Kristin Jackson: Hey, great to be here. 

0:00:59 Taylor Wilson: Good to see you. Happy new year. Happy 2025. 

0:01:02 Kristin Jackson: We made it. 2025, baby. 

0:01:05 Taylor Wilson: We made it. We’re still here. So you and I somehow got connected, I think through a mutual colleague and friend. And you are the CEO and co founder of Free Spoke, a search engine which I am super interested in learning about. Sort of like your co founder journey and then talking about the mission of Free Spoke and kind of sharing with our listeners today, I think some new things about search and the world of search as it relates to their day to day life and then also as you know, marketers, what that, what search might mean for them. So give us a quick rundown on kind of who you are, what you’re about and what Free Spoke is about. 

0:01:44 Kristin Jackson: Yeah. So Kristen Jackson, co founder, CEO, Free Spoke It’s a bit of an interesting founder journey because in my case, my co founder, Todd Ricketts was really the visionary. He said, I’m out here in the world, I’m traveling around the nation and I’m seeing that people just don’t trust the information they’re receiving from Google. I see an opportunity we need to build a search engine to compete with Google. 

0:02:06 Kristin Jackson: And we had built another small company together. And so I had to ask a few times, you’re really serious, right? But what was unique there is he led that initial angel investment. So we had the resources out of the gate to build a strong team, lay a foundation and we did. We’ve built the search engine, we’re in the world. Everybody can go to freespoke.com similar to free speech, freespoke.com check it out. And we do three things different from Google. We always protect your privacy. 

0:02:37 Kristin Jackson: So you are the customer and not the Product, we always show you both sides of an issue. So whatever you’re searching for, you’re going to see content labeled left next to content labeled right. And we are the only pornography free search engine. 

0:02:54 Taylor Wilson: And we’re going to get a little bit into each of those things. I kind of want to dig into all three of those things. When did you guys Start? 

0:03:02 Kristin Jackson: Started in 2019. Building the team. So it’s been six years. Okay, we have traction. I do want to say out of the gate because sometimes I don’t. And people are like, oh yeah, you built a search engine, how cute. And so by the time I can get to like attraction slide, be like, look, we have a regular user base. We had about a million monthly active users and we’ve, we’ve honed in about 700,000 really active monthly active users visiting about 10 million visits a month, generating about 4 million searches a month. So we have this active user base that’s coming, returning, searching, and we’re producing revenue through a premium offering. So you can sign up for premium. 

0:03:41 Kristin Jackson: People are choosing. About 3% of people who download our product through their app, App store, they sign up for premium. So we’re getting some good traction that way. 

0:03:50 Taylor Wilson: What’s the difference between premium and free? 

0:03:54 Kristin Jackson: The main offering right now is an ad free experience. So we built a unique ad blocker into your mobile app. So when you download free spoke, you make us your default browser. It makes us your default search engine throughout your phone. And then when you’re browsing throughout the web, searching through articles, reading content through your free spoke app, you won’t run into any ads anywhere. 

0:04:15 Taylor Wilson: So I want to talk through some challenges like, okay, starting from the ground up, saying we’re going to compete with Google. Like that’s a big lofty statement. What are some of the things that you have found work don’t work as you’re trying to tackle this really big, audacious goal in a market where there’s already like a couple of main players that you’re up against that from a. 

0:04:45 Kristin Jackson: Marketing perspective, what we have found really works is a message that says, we show you what Google won’t. And we’ve had many marketers say, don’t define yourself by what you aren’t, don’t name your competitor. But every single time, it is the highest performing message that we produce through our, our marketing social media outreach, Facebook meta, Instagram, social media. So what we’re finding there is we’re tapping into an audience that’s already skeptical of Google. 

0:05:14 Kristin Jackson: We didn’t have to do any work there that market existed. People are sitting there saying, well yeah, I Google it, I Google it, I Google it. That’s where I go get my information. But insecurity has already seeped in where people are thinking, well if it’s a kind of a controversial topic, I’m not confident Google’s going to show me that full story. So the people we get in front of where they see oh search engine says is going to show me what Google won’t, they come in, they try us, they see these different viewpoints side by side. 

0:05:43 Kristin Jackson: A, they trust us because we’re not putting a thumb on that political scale and B, they, they give us that benefit of the doubt. People feel like you’re right. I wouldn’t have seen this in Google. Yeah, stick around. 

0:05:55 Taylor Wilson: What about is Google the main one? You guys do messaging? I would say against or like are y’all also sort of like doing any plays against other Edge or just other. 

0:06:06 Kristin Jackson: You know, there’s a path to call out DuckDuckGo. So DuckDuckGo is really the main competitor that got out of the gate to pull some market share away from Google. They have about 70 million users, 2% of the market share and they’re producing quality revenue through privacy friendly advertising. That’s their approach. The issue with the way that we could hit DuckDuckGo is they their privacy, privacy, privacy, privacy, privacy. But then I forget it was a couple years ago now, three or four years ago, where it became public that they had the sweetheart deal with Microsoft. They’re basically Microsoft being with privacy built on top. 

0:06:41 Kristin Jackson: But as a result they were leaking all of your data to Microsoft. It was clearly part of their contractual arrangement was that Microsoft would get this data. So all of these individuals who went to docdeco believing that they could trust them, now that’s a chink in the armor of trust. However, from our perspective, we are going after the giant, we’re going after the Goliath. It’s Google that in 2000 created a new standard where you are the product, every click you make, all of your eyeball time online is being leveraged to make money off of you. And that’s a model that Google put in place and meta followed, et cetera. 

0:07:20 Kristin Jackson: So we’re going after that Goliath. 

0:07:22 Taylor Wilson: How do you guys fit into like AI search results now? So like I don’t know that we’d plan to necessarily talk about this, but then it came to mind and it’s so top of mind for me on like a daily basis. 

0:07:35 Kristin Jackson: Yeah. So Deep Seek is in the news very heavily right now, upending the AI market. So for, for people who don’t follow it as closely, you’ve had your traditional US Companies who’ve really been laying this groundwork on generative AI. The ability to take a query and generate a result off of that. We’ve invested so much as a nation and so much in these companies to build that. We expect that to be a huge investment. 

0:08:02 Kristin Jackson: China just came out. Entrepreneur in China created Deep Seq, which is really upending the way we’re looking at AI and saying, oh my gosh, you can do this cheaper and faster. What does that mean for the future of AI? So there’s just so much opportunity in this space and Free Spoke is very well positioned to stay step into these open models and take this faster approach based. You know, it’s helpful to not be the first in. 

0:08:26 Kristin Jackson: We can learn from everybody to pave this ground and take it and run with it. So how Free Spoke looks at it is we have these differentiators in our product. We always show you an index that has right and left side by side. We’re bringing in podcast search. We have it in a beta right now. So in late February, March you’ll be able to search and when in your search results you’ll see snippets from podcasts and you can just play and hear that snippet or go watch, listen to the whole thing. 

0:08:53 Kristin Jackson: And then we’re working on kids specific index to help parents understand what content aids kids development, supports kids development versus it’s kind of that sugary brain drain. So we’re taking our novel index in addition to the large language models that exist and creating our own unique generative AI. So as you follow the trajectory of Free Spoke, right now we’re pretty blue link, you know, like we look a lot like Google, but we’ll have that perplexity generative AI feature. 

0:09:25 Taylor Wilson: Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think that’s changing things for a lot of organizations around their how to get found on the Internet strategy. 

0:09:35 Kristin Jackson: People want that quick context answer and then what we’re seeing and what Google has seen. We have a lead engineer who came to us from Google. People still want those blue links to be able to feel confident and kind of do that extra digging themselves to understand where it came from, from. But that quick and easy summary is, is important. 

0:09:54 Taylor Wilson: Totally. I read it, but I also then click in like print every time. I don’t take that as like this is the end all be all. So okay, let’s talk about Your three differentiators you always have left like you label things and I’ve looked and done searches and everything and see like how I can look at an article or a result and it’ll be labeled left or right. I think it actually just says left and right. Is that right? 

0:10:21 Kristin Jackson: It does. Correct. 

0:10:21 Taylor Wilson: Is there a neutral? 

0:10:23 Kristin Jackson: There’s a middle. 

0:10:24 Taylor Wilson: Middle. Okay, middle. How do you guys like define that in terms of like when you’re showing results? How, how does Free Spoke Engine know that something is left leaning, right leaning or in the middle? 

0:10:37 Kristin Jackson: So we use widely established methodologies to label at the publisher level. It’s very important that we want people to know we’re not willy nilly creating these labels ourselves, which then ruins the trust. Right? Where is this coming from? Why would I trust you? I don’t trust anybody. I don’t trust you either. Ad Fontes is one, all sides is another. There’s a, there’s a couple others that have done the work to create a methodology on how they label left, right or more towards the middle at the publisher level. So we take those widely established methodologies, we apply the labels through our back end technology and then we make sure when you search for something you’re going to get something from both sides. So you never get stuck in one echo chamber. 

0:11:21 Taylor Wilson: Is there ever anything that comes up with no label or does everything have a label currently? 

0:11:27 Kristin Jackson: If it’s a news product and a news URL, it will have a label. 

0:11:33 Taylor Wilson: Okay. Because I’m thinking what if it’s like a medical study or something? 

0:11:39 Kristin Jackson: As a company or sports, our sports content, news articles still have a label because that publishes publisher does have a determined bias. But when you’re reading about sports you’re like, is it really. So the future of Free Spoke, we really, people know us because they know they can come to our product and always see both sides. So when you’re kind of insecure, like I had a friend saying, yeah, like I wasn’t sure on the story around inflation a couple months ago. So I went to Free Spoke just to see what both sides were saying. 

0:12:08 Kristin Jackson: So it really is a both sides offering. But as we take it to the next level, it’s really find the truth and where can we do this in all these different areas? So maybe for sports, I don’t know if you in particular are a huge sports fan. I’m a chiefs fan, which makes people. 

0:12:22 Taylor Wilson: Not like, I don’t, I really don’t know anything about sports. 

0:12:26 Kristin Jackson: But if I use an example of as a sports fan, it’d Be really cool to be able to see how the Chiefs are covering this game and then how the Bills covered the same game. Right. To be able to see both sides. And so it’s not a political lean, but there is two sides to that story. So there’s not always going to be two sides. You know, financial, we look at how we can provide that unique. It’s really an offering to cut through the chaos because people feel like they have more access to information, but they feel less informed. 

0:12:54 Kristin Jackson: So how can we take those different topics and say, okay, on this topic, here’s how to help people structure it so they can feel more informed? 

0:13:02 Taylor Wilson: Well, I think it’s fascinating because when you go and I think people do get down echo chambers, like they go to one news source all the time for all their news. And like, if you go read, I think it’s really important for people to read both, you know, and so this makes it easy for people to see both kind of side by side. 

0:13:23 Kristin Jackson: It’s hard for an extreme position to really sustain itself. Once you have an opportunity to see a rational explanation of the other side, it just helps you. It doesn’t mean you’re going to change your point of view. There’s like, oh, well, it’s not all evil and crazy on the other side. There’s kind of a rational thought there. So. Helps you just not be angry, I think. 

0:13:43 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, yeah, I think so too. And I think it’s just like it’s important to do due diligence, to not just take everything that the media is putting at us and just say, oh, that must be right. Well, I don’t know. 

0:13:54 Kristin Jackson: Like, truly, our nation was founded on debate. Debate. Our founding fathers debated each other over the years and back and forth, and there was never a. A misunderstanding of the other side. They knew the other side so well, they could spit it back out in a debate and debate it right. Like that’s what made the future stronger. And so it’s just like it’s a basis of debate. You can’t debate somebody if you don’t understand deeply and respectfully their point of view. 

0:14:22 Taylor Wilson: Well, I think people are just so misinformed on both sides. Like, if you go far left, far right, and people like angle and like a far direction, I think you’re just generally get misinformed about a lot of stuff. And I think that happens on both sides of the political. 

0:14:39 Kristin Jackson: Absolutely. And I would go back to the Goliath that we’re fighting, because when those platforms are trying to produce quarterly revenue, the only way they’re producing more revenue every quarter is by getting more money out of you, your eyeballs and your clicks. How do we get more money? How does the platform. Not us, because we don’t do it this way. How does a platform get more money out of you when they’re just monetizing your eyeballs and your clicks? 

0:15:01 Kristin Jackson: They drive more fear, more extreme. So you’re more likely to click and get that fear and go down those rabbit holes. So we have to pull all of those layers back and monetize the product differently. 

0:15:13 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, yeah. And it’s funny, you see it in social media too. Like people leaving Twitter, you know, and going to Blue sky. And I’m like, well, then you’re gonna go to. I still think you should look at both, because now if you go to Blue sky and it’s just everyone who left Twitter, like, it’s gonna become an echo chamber over there. Just like Twitter is an echo chamber, opposite direction. 

0:15:34 Kristin Jackson: You really need both in the product. You got to break. A way to break through is to show. 

0:15:39 Taylor Wilson: So let’s talk about kids. Do you guys have a kid specific browser right now? 

0:15:44 Kristin Jackson: So we haven’t launched it. We have a clickable prototype on what a kid specific browser search engine. It’s really a search engine, but you do have to control that ecosystem through the browser for a child product. We have a product that we’re testing and we’re seeking. We have a lot of feedback. So now we’re in a phase of getting out there and getting 100 parents to say, yes, I’m in on this. I’ll pay $60 a year to help kickstart this thing and get it up and running. 

0:16:12 Taylor Wilson: And it’s probably something that you would go to, like, school districts and systems and say, like, hey, especially with so much online remote learning now, I mean, there’s a lot. I know my kids have gone to school, like, literally twice this year because we’ve had so much snow. And they do a lot of online remote learning. They have, you know, their school laptops, which has programs and stuff locked down. But then they still tell me stories about, like, this kid found porn on his school laptop. 

0:16:44 Taylor Wilson: So, like, let’s talk a little bit about that because I think that’s really interesting too and really, really relevant. 

0:16:50 Kristin Jackson: I think what’s. What’s helpful for a general population to understand. We didn’t go into this with some high and mighty, we’re not going to show porn. We got into building a search engine and we learned that online pornography is the third most common form of sex trafficking. So according to the national Human Trafficking Hotline. So what that means is of these women who call in and say, I’m stuck in this sex trafficking situation, a third of them are being exploited through pornography. 

0:17:17 Kristin Jackson: It’s just an interesting like eye opening situation. I always was like, if these women are choosing to do that to make money and spend their time, like, yeah, me coming down on them through a product isn’t going to like change anything. But what that statistic tells you is these many, many, many of these women are not choosing to be there. They’re getting trapped in those situations. So at that point we were like this, we don’t want to be a part of continuing that abuse. And then Pepperdine Law Review statistic is that one out of five pornographic images is of a child. 

0:17:49 Kristin Jackson: So we know that child sex abuse material is very rampant. There’s, it’s a huge problem. A lot of big tech is trying to tamp down on it, but it’s just spreading rampantly throughout these platforms. So that’s what really got us down this path is we’re like, we’re not, we’re just not going to show this adult content. Why, once you step back and think about it, why do you take the back room of a video store? 

0:18:11 Kristin Jackson: We put it in a back room for a reason. When you had to go rent it. 

0:18:15 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. 

0:18:16 Kristin Jackson: Put it on the front of a search engine and hand it to our children. 

0:18:19 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. 

0:18:20 Kristin Jackson: And it helps you realize like, okay, you can be a proponent of that adult content and not put it at the fingertips of these eight year old boys who are finding it, getting addicted to it naturally because their neural pathways haven’t fully formed yet. So they’re forming their pleasure centrals around this content that they see that’s very aggressive. We can go into all those details. So that was a lot of the passion. We’re like, wow, this is something we can help change the tide and make sure kids have a product where they can search that the bad content isn’t coming up with the good. 

0:18:55 Kristin Jackson: And now we’re interested in taking it to that next level because there’s content that can feed productive creative brain activity at that young age. And then there’s content that’s more like that sugar high that just kind of turns you into that mind numbing scroll. So how do we work together with some experts similarly to widely established methodologies for labeling political lean at the publisher level? 

0:19:18 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. 

0:19:18 Kristin Jackson: We’re working to find those partners who can label content that supports and develops young brain activity and that that is more of the sugar high. So parents can help navigate that space. 

0:19:30 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, it’s so hard as a parent now. I mean I’ve got a 14 year old and so sort of at this crossroads, you know, like when it’s time to like have a phone, not have a phone and scary. Every kid has a phone and then there’s so many reasons where it makes sense to allow them to have a phone and at the same time like you hate it. But one of those things is like you just see these, the kids. I see it my, my own children on their devices, their friends, you know how it is. It’s like that to like the point where like we’re driving home from school and it’s like YouTube short after YouTube short and I’m like, turn it off. I cannot hear that right now. 

0:20:17 Taylor Wilson: Turn it off. 

0:20:18 Kristin Jackson: And it’s forming how these kids are thinking and it totally is how their endorphins get hit and kind of what they expect life to produce. Right. That’s training. 

0:20:28 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. So let’s go. Okay, I want to go a little bit deeper on your. One of your cornerstones is privacy and you mentioned that at the very kind of beginning of this conversation. Tell me a little bit more about how Free Spoke is protecting people’s privacy when it comes to search. 

0:20:45 Kristin Jackson: So quick background. What we really see in this online platform space is a move into privacy and then from privacy into specialization of that platform. So DuckDuckGo showed that people will make a move and change their search engine which is a big step for people based on privacy. So there’s a market there, Apple, I was watching sports last weekend and they’re really doing these huge pushes on how they protect your privacy. So it’s interesting to see kind of that societal shift to start thinking about it. 

0:21:18 Kristin Jackson: We out of the gate we just knew that we would, the company would be co opted and people would become the product again. And if you know, if we ever went public or pass away at some point somebody else is running the company and there’s just this incentive to make more and more money and you can do it through taking people’s data. You’re going to abuse people. It’s just, we’ve seen it happen. So as a result we just drew a very hard line out of the gate. Searches will always be anonymous. 

0:21:47 Kristin Jackson: We will never manipulate a search result based off knowing who somebody is and what their insecurities are or what their history is like. We are just recent and relevant information to that search query is what you’ll Receive, it will never be pulled from your data. 

0:22:04 Taylor Wilson: Now, as a user, I can still go see my search history, right? 

0:22:08 Kristin Jackson: And that’s usually stored in your browser. So yeah, that is something you can. 

0:22:13 Taylor Wilson: Still access that’s not affected. But it’s just I, as a browser searching for things through Free Spoke, can know that you guys, like, I’m totally anonymous to you without the need for like some VPN or anything, like changing my ip, like, anything like that. 

0:22:31 Kristin Jackson: And so right now you’re searching for something, I’m searching for something in Free Spoke. We’re going to see the same result in Google. They know everything about you. And so they’re always trying to, like, they’re trying to serve you because they want you to click and they want to make money and that can be a positive thing. So they will feed you different results than they feed me. We’re not doing that right now. Everything is anonymous and it’s just the most recent relevant information in response to that search query. 

0:22:55 Kristin Jackson: As we grow and we do, you can set up your own account, you can block results in your own account right now. So that’ll start to personalize your account if you want to in the future create some sort of. I want more of this, I want less of that. Right. Like personalize it that you’ll have the option to do that. But we don’t want it. We’re keeping that anonymized to your desire and we’re not selling that. We’re very much drawing the line that you’re not the product. We’re not going to take that information and sell it. 

0:23:24 Taylor Wilson: How does that affect, like, your strategy with advertisers? Because if advertisers like, you can’t pitch to advertisers, like, we’re going to show your stuff to people who we know like, might like you. 

0:23:38 Kristin Jackson: Yeah, we’ve left it. We in drawing that hard line and our engineers really just like our stalwart in it. We allow no pixels in those search pages because once you allow Facebook’s pixel in there, then they start to glean information about your users and what they’re doing and where they’ve been. Yeah, so you’re right. So we. It does. It makes it a lot harder to market. We can’t retarget in those ways. 

0:24:03 Kristin Jackson: We can’t tell people, oh, advertise in our product. And we’re going to tell you everything about these people and what they do and how they feel and what they bought last. You know, like we. So that is why a premium offering is A big part of our revenue strategy is people want to pay $30 a year to be the customer and be served. And if they’re not paying they will see privacy focused advertising. But we’re just not capable of generating as much revenue off advertising because we’re not taking your data. 

0:24:30 Taylor Wilson: So then will I not see so much of like the weird ass like clickbait? 

0:24:35 Kristin Jackson: Yeah, you won’t. Yeah, yeah. It won’t be in the product. 

0:24:38 Taylor Wilson: It wouldn’t be there. 

0:24:40 Kristin Jackson: What’s really fascinating is Google’s founders wrote in the paper, wrote a paper in 2000, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. So people can go find this white paper from the year 2000 and they specifically say that advertising funded search engines have a disadvantage towards the customer. And they give specific examples like if this was happening and then there’d be a conflict of the search engine showing this content over that because the person paid for an ad. And so we can’t show this derogatory information about them even though it’s true. Right. They spelled it out and they said we need, as a result there needs to be a competitive search engine that’s not funded through advertising. 

0:25:17 Kristin Jackson: They just didn’t get their wish because Google got addicted to that ad model and they can’t get off of it now. 

0:25:23 Taylor Wilson: It’s hard when you’re on the treadmill. 

0:25:26 Kristin Jackson: Generating a lot of money for them. 

0:25:28 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Okay. So like I’m in Martech too. Like that’s one of my world. There’s like 20,000 something martech platforms now. It’s ridiculous. How many like roundabout. How many search engines are there in the market? 

0:25:45 Kristin Jackson: Yeah, the ones that we would there. So there’s probably like I gotta say I’m out loud to get to it. So you have Google and Bing that everybody knows you have DuckDuckGo that I’ve mentioned. Brave would be our other competitor in this space that’s privacy oriented and working to specialize on top of that. And then Free Spoke is in that. And then Perplexity is your new kind of AI search engine that’s taking off. So that’s kind of the main landscape. And then there’s probably. 

0:26:13 Kristin Jackson: Yeah, the index is a Russian based one that people really like because you can get around where Google is controlling information. So, so yeah, probably add like 6 or 7 more between smaller us and then like international. 

0:26:28 Taylor Wilson: So it’s, it’s like, it’s a smaller, it’s a, it’s a much smaller list for sure. 

0:26:32 Kristin Jackson: People just, people laughed at us six years ago when we started this company, and now they’re seeing the disruption, and we’ve laid the groundwork to be able to take advantage of it. But it’s a smaller ecosystem just because, like, yeah, people didn’t think there was any way to compete. 

0:26:46 Taylor Wilson: Okay, so what’s, what’s something that you’re excited about in this year, you know, that you think is going to be like, people should be paying attention to? 

0:26:54 Kristin Jackson: For us, it’s the fact that Google lost their search monopoly, antitrust suit. And so remedies will be coming down this year where the government says, okay, we won. This is what you need to do to comply with this, with this ruling. So it’ll be really interesting to see how that opens up. AI is just like we were mentioning. Deep Seq was the latest thing this week, but there’s always something new. So where can we get in here? And what I’m most excited about is there is an opportunity to tackle this technology space and make it work for human flourishing. 

0:27:31 Kristin Jackson: We as humans are in the physical space and we structure the physical space so we can flourish. We plug the outlets for our kids, we put floaties on them in the deep end. We, we have deer permits so we don’t die on the highway with deer running everywhere. Right. Like, we have structure in the physical world, so we flourish. This does not exist in the online world right now. So I think in this year, to really tackle this, our company is really positioned to take off and say, we’re here for you. 

0:28:01 Kristin Jackson: We’re here for you to flourish and to live in this space in a happy way that drives productivity and value. 

0:28:08 Taylor Wilson: I love that. That’s such a good note to end on. Okay. People can go to freespoke.com to use it if they want to learn more about just what you guys are doing or get in touch with you. What’s a good way to do that? 

0:28:23 Kristin Jackson: I’m happy to share my personal email. So it’s my first name@freespoke.com Kristinreespoke.com K R I S T I N@freespoke.com. yeah. Feel free to reach out, give us feedback, check out the product, download it in your app store. 

0:28:37 Taylor Wilson: Awesome. Go Chiefs. Right. 

0:28:39 Kristin Jackson: Go Chiefs. Three Pete. 

0:28:43 Taylor Wilson: I’m actually going to be in Kansas in a couple of weeks. Three weeks. Yeah. I’ll be be flying through your neck of the woods. 

0:28:50 Kristin Jackson: Okay, let me know. 

0:28:52 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I will. Kristen, this is awesome. This is really, I think, informative. I think it’s important for us to bring these types of things to the forefront. So I appreciate you sharing this and what you guys are doing so that people can learn about Free Spoke and just like another perspective, you know. And I think that’s a big point of a lot of my heart behind doing this podcast is to bring people on and give some new perspectives on things. So thank you so much and until next time folks, keep doing all that shizzle. 

0:29:29 Taylor Wilson: Well hey there, that was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening Shizzle our guests bring to us with every single episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast player so that you don’t miss a beat of the Talking Shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review. 

0:29:58 Taylor Wilson: We’d love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the good juicy business growth sizzle that you’d like to hear about. Be sure to get in touch with us and follow along at creativeshizzle.com or shoot us an email at podcast at creativeschizzle.com now until next time, we hope you go get your big Shizzle done.