Openwiki and the FEED - 2 new apps for free that aim to take out larger competitors

The web is full of polished, account-heavy platforms that intermediate between you and information. Wikipedia is free in theory but wrapped in ads, tracking, and slow interfaces on many devices. News feeds are algorithmically shaped, personalized for engagement, and locked behind logins or paywalls.

Two new single-page apps from webXOS push hard in the opposite direction: OpenWiki and THE FEED. Both are free, local-first, zero-account tools that run entirely in your browser. They cache everything on-device in IndexedDB, talk only to public keyless APIs, and never send your queries, history, or interests to a central server.

They don’t claim to “replace” Wikipedia or Google News overnight. They do something more interesting: they remove the intermediary layer that most people have accepted as normal.

THE FEED – Local-First News Engine

URL: https://agentowl.netlify.app/feed

THE FEED is a news reader that fans out across public sources, ranks stories by recency plus your saved interests, and keeps the entire dataset on your device.

Core idea: No accounts. No tracking. No keys. Everything lives in the-feed-v1 IndexedDB.

Default sources (all toggleable):

• RSS via public CORS bridges: BBC World, BBC Tech, NPR News, Al Jazeera, The Verge, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, Wired, Hacker News RSS, Lobste.rs
• Hacker News Firebase
• JSON APIs: GitHub Trending, Dev.to, Spaceflight News

You can turn any of them off. The app still works with a single source.

How ranking works
Results are ordered by a combination of recency and the interests you have saved. There is no black-box engagement model optimizing for time-on-site. What you mark as interesting becomes the signal.

Interface & controls

• Clean dark terminal-style UI
• Search box (leave blank for latest)
• Sort toggle (ALGO)
• Refresh
• Saved articles counter
• Keyboard shortcuts: / focuses search, Esc closes modals
• Color invert, fullscreen, clear database (with confirmation), settings, about

Everything you touch is cached locally. Health indicators show source status. The app is currently at v2.3.1.

Why this matters
Most news products either (a) require an account so they can profile you, or (b) are pure RSS readers that give you zero ranking intelligence. THE FEED sits in the middle: public sources + local ranking + local storage. No middleman owns your reading history.

OpenWiki – Local-First Wikipedia Engine

URL: https://agentowl.netlify.app/openwiki

OpenWiki turns Wikipedia’s public APIs into a fast, private, infinite-scroll research tool that improves the more you use it.

Core idea: Search Wikipedia, cache every article you touch, and rank results with a hybrid of deterministic vectors and (optional) on-device embeddings. Nothing leaves the browser except the API calls to en.wikipedia.org.

The pipeline

1. Search fans out to:
   • action=query&list=search (paginated with continue for infinite scroll)
   • action=opensearch
   • Batched REST summary fetches
2. Results are deduplicated and scored with JEV (JSON Entity Vector).
3. Optional MiniLM embedder (via transformers.js) can be turned on for hybrid ranking: 0.35·JEV + 0.65·MiniLM.
4. Everything is stored under openwiki-v1 in IndexedDB.

JEV – the interesting technical piece
JEV is a 512-dimension float vector computed deterministically from text. It uses position-weighted unigrams, bigrams, trigrams, and character 3-grams of longer tokens, all hashed into a shared space, weighted, and L2-normalized. Ranking becomes a simple dot product. No model download required for the base experience. MiniLM is additive, never a replacement.

Privacy model

• Only outbound traffic: Wikipedia’s public read-only APIs + (optional) jsDelivr for MiniLM weights.
• Weights are cached by the browser and run entirely on-device.
• No OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any closed endpoints.
• No account, no tracking, no server-side storage.

Shared Philosophy: The OWL Family (agentowl.netlify.app)

Both tools belong to the same family of local-first apps from webXOS:

• THE FEED – news
• OpenWiki – Wikipedia
• knOOgle – keyless meta-search across public APIs
• owl: arcr – prompt architect (Action → Role → Context → Response)
• OWL Agent – decision-augmented research agent (single HTML file)

Common traits:

• Single-file or near-single-file web apps
• IndexedDB as the primary datastore
• Zero accounts / zero tracking
• Public keyless sources only
• Export everything (Markdown, JSON, CSV, etc.)
• Optional donations via Buy Me a Coffee (never required, never unlocks features)

How They Challenge Larger Competitors

They don’t have the scale of Google or the depth of Wikipedia’s full media layer. What they have is a radically simpler trust model and a performance profile that gets better the longer you use them (because the local cache grows).

For developers, researchers, and privacy-conscious readers, that trade-off is attractive.

Final Thought

Most “alternative” tools still sit on someone else’s infrastructure and still want an account. OpenWiki and THE FEED take the harder path: pure client-side, public APIs only, and your browser as the only server that matters.

They won’t displace the giants tomorrow. But they prove that a serious, usable, free information layer can exist without the usual compromises. That alone is worth paying attention to — and, if they save you time, buying the developer a coffee.

Try them. Cache a few dozen articles or a day’s worth of news. Notice how the experience changes once the data lives with you instead of with a platform.

Links

• THE FEED → https://agentowl.netlify.app/feed
• OpenWiki → https://agentowl.netlify.app/openwiki
• webXOS family → https://agentowl.netlify.app