Evrthn.com (pronounced everything) is a new search engine targeting the metaverse with a promise to deliver more detailed search results, particularly for non-text metaverse (XR) content. This is an area in which dominant competitor Google is considered to be lagging.
Creator Herval Freire, who worked at Facebook for two years and scaled up its end-to-end encryption services, told MetaNews that existing search engines, including Google, were selling users short on metaverse content.
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“Our mission is to make all the metaverse content (from items within World of Warcraft to clubs and raves in VRChat) easily accessible to everyone,” said the software engineer who also worked for Twitter and WeWork.
“It started out as something for personal usage – we were trying to find standup comedy in virtual reality [VR], and we couldn’t really find it. Then a friend sent me a campaign about how Heineken is now in Decentraland, and guess what – you can’t find it either!”
“Discovering good content seems to be a pain across the industry, so this is our attempt at helping finding cool content a little bit easier,” Freire wrote in LinkedIn post.
What is Evrthn.com?
Evrthn.com offers free-to-use search and allows users to find events, venues, video games and people across the entire metaverse. Users are asked to create an account, which can help to narrow searches based on one’s preferences, as well as provide access to “communities”. It lists metaverse get-togethers such as Raves, Events, Communities, Apps & Games and so on.
“[With] personal profiles, you can setup an account with just an email (no social logins or passwords required),” Freire said in a LinkedIn post. “[You can] create lists for all the virtual reality content you find cool – as your own private bookmarks or to share with others!”
“We’re starting out focused on VRChat and AltspaceVR, due to the ridiculous amount of content available on those platforms. But you’ll notice there’s also content from other sites in the platform too – news, games, assets for sale in multiple sites, etc,” he added.
Evrthn’s coverage has now grown to include RecRoom, Decentraland, Monaverse, MetaQuest games on the official store, SideQuest and Itch, Freire said. Evrthn was launched six months ago. The company was founded as a unit of Labyrinth Labs Inc. in July 2022, a metaverse-focused firm Freire also founded
🆕 Hot off the press: you can now share any pages from https://t.co/4JSsdToDn4 to your Quest (all models) – when you visit any Quest-compatible content you like, you'll now see an “Open on Quest” link, that'll send you straight to the “Save to VR” page 🤩 pic.twitter.com/VbLqM9USFo
— Labyrinth Labs (@labyrinthlabs_) December 2, 2022
Most search engines such as Google save your search history in a profile that the company uses to filter results based on user activity to create targeted ads. The feature may be useful for most users, but it also comes across as a form of tracking, threatening user privacy.
Not many users, yet
Evrthn runs a proprietary crawling stack that works for hyperlinked content (the same kind of infrastructure that Google or other web engines use), said Freire. The firm has also created special crawlers to consume 3D content/assets and APIs from several partners.
Data intelligence firm SimilarWeb reports that the number of people visiting Evrthn.com over the last month averaged under 5,000. The company pointed out that it “does not present data for websites with < 5K estimated visits for the last month.”
“Only data verified by Google Analytics will be displayed,” it said. So there was no data related to issues such as Evrthn’s audience composition, the countries sending the most traffic or the type of stuff that people search for the most. About his company’s reach, Freire said:
“We monitor over half a million rooms, assets, games and apps, and the amount of content is growing exponentially.”
Trying out Evrthn.com
Search the term “metaverse” on both Google and Evrthn, and the first page of the results are completely different. While the Google search engine leads with a Wikipedia entry, links to popular gaming metaverses, news articles and social media feeds, Evrthn’s results are much narrower.
The budding search engine leads with results in grid form of metaverse experiences cutting across culture and gaming, a bit of news and events. Google certainly offers more variety and resources about the metaverse – but Evrthn gives you the actual metaverse experience. Or at least links that take you to actual, existing metaverses and metaverse-specific content.
Like Google, which pushes adverts for profit, it also felt as though Evrthn.com was blatantly pushing me into buying something, a video game. Its home page lists a few games for sale. And a few extra searches brought up more games on sale, for as low as $4.99.
One such game is Magitek VR, a so–called “magic adventure game that uses physics driven spells based on the four elements,” which is going for $15. When you click on the Magitek link you get redirected to SideQuest, the early access layer for virtual reality, where the content is sold.
It is not clear whether Evrthn takes a cut from the sales. However, the company will have to do more to challenge Google’s dominance in the search business. Freire, the Evrthn founder, hopes to take advantage of Google’s limits in providing non-text metaverse content.
“Keeping up to date with all that content is difficult,” Freire said. “There’s a lot that one cannot easily find [on Google] – content inside social VR platforms, assets (avatars, skins, etc) and live events are hard to find since there’s no other search index out there that covers them.”
Beyond search engine
Herval Freire sees Evrthn growing beyond just being a search engine. “Although we started with a ‘search engine’, we want Evrthn to be an essential tool for content discovery and navigation in the metaverse,” Freire told MetaNews.
The software engineer said his company is working on providing users with “better ways” to organize and manage their own metaverse activities, such as creating and hosting events, managing their virtual goods and assets.
There are a number of upcoming search engines competing for a stake in the metaverse, a burgeoning multi-billion-dollar industry seen by many as the future of human interactions. It includes Hyperpeach, which is in beta, and Nvidia’s artificial intelligence-powered DeepSearch. In May, Canadian company Lighthouse Labs announced it had raised $7 million to build a search engine focused on the metaverse.
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