Getting Started With SearchQ: Your First 10 Minutes

Getting started with SearchQ takes about a minute: open the app, type your question, and send it, you never pick a model, because routing chooses the best one for each prompt. No sign-up is required to try it. In your first 10 minutes, send a message, verify an answer, and explore the privacy dial.

What is SearchQ?

SearchQ is a privacy-focused, multi-model AI chat app that runs many frontier models behind one simple chat box. Instead of asking you to pick a model, it routes each prompt automatically, can cross-check answers with a second model, and offers a privacy dial spanning cloud sync, an encrypted enclave, and a fully on-device mode. There is a free tier with daily limits.

The design goal is to remove two everyday frictions of AI chat. First, you should not have to track a fast-moving field of models to get a good answer, so routing handles model selection for you. Second, you should decide who can read each conversation, so privacy is a per-chat setting rather than a single global policy. Around that core sit web search, document chat, and voice input.

How do I send my first message?

Type your question and press send, that is the whole flow. SearchQ's Best-Model mode reads each prompt and routes it to the best-fit model, so you never choose one. You can send your first message as a guest, without an account, subject to a daily limit, then sign in later to keep your history.

Routing matters because the model landscape is genuinely hard to navigate by hand. A single aggregator like OpenRouter now fronts more than 300 models, and across the major APIs output prices alone range more than 640×. Picking one model yourself means betting it is right for every kind of question - a quick fact, a coding task, a long analysis - when no single model wins them all.

Letting a router decide also tends to save money without hurting quality. Published research on the RouteLLM framework (UC Berkeley, ICLR 2025) showed a router could cut costs by roughly 85% while keeping 95% of GPT-4's quality by sending only the hard prompts to an expensive model. In practice, that means you can just write the question and trust that easy prompts go to cheap, fast models and hard ones go to stronger models.

How do I get a more trustworthy answer?

Use the two features built for trust: a multi-model council and inline verification. A council asks several frontier models the same question in parallel, then a summary model synthesizes one consensus answer that highlights agreement, divergence, and unique points. Inline verification has a peer model fact-check an answer and flag unsupported or wrong claims, so you can see which parts are shaky.

The two serve different moments. Reach for a council on hard, ambiguous, or high-stakes questions, where independent models catch mistakes a single one would miss; the per-model answers collapse behind a "Consulted N models" expander and the synthesized answer is the hero. The council size scales with your plan, so paid plans consult more models per question.

Inline verification is lighter and runs after a normal answer. A strong peer model reviews the response and marks claims with color-coded highlights and a clear verdict, which is a fast way to spot a confident-but-wrong sentence before you act on it. Neither feature is a guarantee, models can share blind spots, but together they turn "trust me" into something you can inspect.

How do I keep a chat private?

Use the privacy dial, which has three settings: Cloud, Encrypted, and Local. Cloud syncs to your account for convenience. Encrypted runs inside an end-to-end encrypted confidential-compute enclave that even the operator cannot read. Local runs the model fully in your browser, offline, and is free and unlimited. An Incognito toggle keeps any chat out of your saved history.

Mode	Where it runs	Who can read it	Works offline	Cost
Cloud	Provider servers, synced to your account	You + provider per policy	No	Included in your plan
Encrypted	Hardware-isolated confidential-compute enclave	Only you	No	Included in your plan
Local	Fully in your browser, on your device	Only you	Yes	Free and unlimited

This control exists because the privacy gap is what most people worry about. In a Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 U.S. adults, published in June 2026, 71% predicted AI would make their personal information less secure, versus just 3% who expected it to become more secure. The point of the dial is to let you match the mode to the sensitivity of each conversation rather than accept one setting for everything. In sensitive modes, SearchQ uses zero data retention and never trains on your conversations.

How do I use web search and documents?

Web search is always on for capable models: when a question needs current facts, the model searches the web and cites its sources inline, so you can click through and confirm. You can also chat with your documents, add a file and SearchQ reads it, including OCR for scanned pages, so answers are grounded in your own content rather than the model's memory.

Grounding an answer in real sources is one of the most reliable ways to reduce errors, because the model summarizes material it can actually see instead of reconstructing it from training data. The same applies to your files: the document's text is extracted so the answer can draw on the most relevant passages. In Local mode, that document processing, including OCR and on-device retrieval (RAG), happens entirely in your browser, so the file is never uploaded. Voice input is also available if you would rather speak your prompt than type it.

What should I try in my first 10 minutes?

Spend the time touching one feature from each part of the product, so you understand how routing, trust, and privacy fit together. None of these requires configuration, they are toggles and buttons in the chat. Here is a simple sequence that fits comfortably in 10 minutes:

1. Send a normal question in Best-Model mode and notice you never had to pick a model.
2. Ask something current, a recent event or price, and watch the answer cite web sources inline.
3. Verify an answer. Trigger inline verification on a factual reply and read the color-coded verdict.
4. Run a council on a harder or higher-stakes question, then open the consensus summary.
5. Add a document and ask a question about it to see grounded, file-based answers.
6. Move the privacy dial. Switch a chat to Encrypted or Local, and try the Incognito toggle.

After that loop you will have used routing, web search, verification, a council, document chat, and all three privacy levels. From there, the only real decision left per conversation is the one that matters most: who is allowed to read it.

Methodology

Product behavior described here reflects the shipped SearchQ app as of June 2026, including Best-Model routing, the multi-model council and its per-plan size, inline verification, the Cloud, Encrypted, and Local privacy dial, always-on web search, and document chat. External statistics are quoted from their primary sources and linked inline, with figures current as of June 2026; each number is attributed to its original publisher rather than restated as a SearchQ metric.

Sources

• OpenRouter - Models
• CloudZero - LLM API Pricing Comparison 2026
• LMSYS / RouteLLM - Cost-Effective LLM Routing (ICLR 2025)
• Pew Research Center - Americans and AI 2026 (June 17, 2026)