How Rockad works

What happens to your Need

You describe what's in your way in your own words, in any language. Rockad searches the first 500 characters, on one line.

Before searching, one call to a language model (Claude, from Anthropic) reads your Need for two things:

• Your Need in English. Listings are written in English, so search matches the English against them. If your Need is already in English, it stays as you wrote it.
• Requirements: hard conditions you state, such as a platform, a price, who it's for, or an Indie maker. Each one becomes a filter, shown as a chip above the results, and you can remove any of them. The model can only pick values Rockad already has filters for, and it reads your Need and nothing else, never the Listings.

If the model fails or is slow, search runs on your Need as you wrote it, without chips. AI assistants that search Rockad for someone (over MCP) pass their own filters, so their Needs are searched as written.

What is recorded

Your own words are what's shown and what's recorded. With each search Rockad keeps the Need, the filters on, which Requirements were read and which you removed, whether it came from the site or an AI assistant, when, the top 10 results with their scores, and the Near Misses (below). The English and the Requirements are kept with the Need, so the same Need doesn't need reading again. Conditions no filter covers, like “works with Fortnox”, are kept as short phrases on their own, not tied to the Need.

None of it says who you are: no account, IP address or session. The model providers get only the text (details on the privacy page). Only the people who run Rockad can read recorded Needs today.

How results are ordered

Search looks at the Published Listings that pass your filters and gives each a match score from 0 to 1. It has two parts:

• Meaning: closeness in meaning counts for 80%. A model (OpenAI's embeddings) turns your Need and each Listing into numbers that can be compared. A Listing's are made from its name, short description, Problems and tags.
• Keywords: the share of your keywords for 20%. These are the words of your Need, with common words like “the” left out and endings ignored (“invoices” matches “invoice”), found in a Listing's name, Problems, tags or short description.

What counts as a result

• A Listing that contains any of your keywords is a result, whatever its score.
• A Listing with no keyword in common is a result if its score is at least 0.4.
• One with no keyword in common and a score from 0.3 up to 0.4 is a Near Miss. It isn't shown. It is recorded with your Need, so Makers can later see which Needs almost found them.

The order

Results are ordered by their match score plus a small boost from Stars (see Stars), highest first. When two results are still equal, the one where your keywords weigh more comes first: a word in the name or a Problem counts more than one in the tags, and the tags more than the short description.

Results that are equal after that are put in a daily order: each Listing's place comes from a hash of the Listing and the day's date in Stockholm. It is the same for everyone all day and changes at midnight, so over time no Listing comes first more often because of its name.

Filters

You can filter by Indie makers only, price, platform, who it's made for and Category. A filter keeps Listings that have any of the values you chose, and filters combine. Every Listing states its price, platforms and audiences. “Indie makers only” keeps Listings whose Maker says it is Indie, and Unclaimed Listings Rockad judged Indie; other Unclaimed Listings are left out.

Under each of the top 5 results you see how it stands against the Requirements still on, from what the Listing itself says.

What AI does, and what it doesn't

Rockad uses language models where they read or explain:

• reading your Need for its Requirements and its English (above),
• matching by meaning (above),
• writing a sentence or two under each of the top 5 results on why it may fit your Need, marked as written by Rockad's assistant. The model gets your Need and that Listing's own text (name, description, Problems, price, platforms, audiences, Category) and nothing else,
• suggesting a Listing from a Product's website: for a Maker to edit before submitting, and for the Unclaimed Listings Rockad writes.

A model never decides the order, and never adds or drops a result. The explanations arrive after the results are already in place. A model never says anything about a Product from its own knowledge either, only what the Listing says. What a model knows comes from what is already written about on the web, so it favours Products that are already known and marketed. That is the bias Rockad is here to correct.

AI assistants that search Rockad get the same results in the same order as the site, each with the address of its Listing.

Nothing is for sale

• Nobody can pay to be placed higher, in search or anywhere else.
• There are no ads.
• Rockad never passes your details to a Maker. Makers see how many times their Listings were viewed, followed to their site and Starred, with nothing about who.

Category pages and the home page

Category pages

Browse by category lists the Categories that have Published Listings, alphabetically, with how many each has. A Category's page shows all its Published Listings in the same daily order as equal search results: a hash of the Listing and the day's date, the same for everyone that day. There is no Need to rank by there, so Stars play no part.

The home page

The example Needs on the home page are real Problems, as their Makers (or Rockad, for an Unclaimed Listing) wrote them. Up to 10 are drawn on every visit, uniformly at random over Published Listings, one Problem from each, and spread over Categories so that no Category takes more than its share. Only Problems up to 72 characters are used, and the same Need twice is shown once. Stars and anything else a Maker can influence play no part. Next to each example, the demo shows the Listing it came from.

Stars

Anyone signed in can Star a Published Listing, once. A Star also saves the Listing for you. There is no negative mark.

A Star by a User of the Listing's own Maker is only a bookmark: it doesn't count in any Star count or in the order. Whether someone is a User is judged now, not when they Starred.

In search, Stars add 0.02 × log10(1 + Stars) to the match score, which runs from 0 to 1. The boost grows slower the more Stars there are:

Stars only change the order of results. They never make a Listing a result or a Near Miss, and they play no part on Category pages or the home page.

Listings: who writes them, who checks them

A Listing is Rockad's record of one Product. Its Maker writes it, or Rockad does, for an Unclaimed Listing.

Unclaimed Listings

To get the catalog started, Rockad writes some Listings itself. A model reads the Product's public website and suggests the text in Rockad's own words, and a person at Rockad checks it before it is published. Rockad copies no text and adds no screenshots. Wherever you see an Unclaimed Listing it is marked “Not confirmed by the Maker”, and its page says Rockad wrote it.

Approval

Every new Listing, the Maker's or Rockad's, waits until a person at Rockad has checked it. Then it is published or rejected, with a reason. A Maker's edits to a Published Listing show right away. Rockad can unpublish a Listing that breaks the terms, with a reason, and editing a rejected or unpublished Listing sends it back to be checked.

Claiming a Listing

The people behind a Product can take its Unclaimed Listing over by showing it's theirs: with an email address on the Product's domain, or a DNS record or meta tag on it. Claiming is free.

Rockad sends one Claim Invitation per Product, ever, with no follow-ups. It says where the address was found, and has a link to opt out of all email from Rockad. Its link signs that address in for 30 days.

Once Claimed, the Listing is the Maker's. The “Not confirmed by the Maker” mark goes away at once, before any rewriting. The Maker can edit the name, web address, short description, its 3–5 Problems, tags, Category, price, platforms and audiences, add a logo and up to 6 screenshots, and say whether the Maker is Indie.

Removal

Anyone behind a Product can ask Rockad to remove its Unclaimed Listing, from the Listing's page and without an account, and Rockad does. A Maker can remove its own Claimed Listing from its edit page. Removal is for good.

Marks on a Listing

• Indie means a Maker that is around ten people or fewer, and not majority-owned by a larger company or by venture capital. A Maker says so itself; Rockad can unpublish a Listing with a false claim. On an Unclaimed Listing, Indie is Rockad's judgement, and the mark says so, until a Maker Claims it and answers for itself.
• Verified means Rockad has confirmed who is behind this Maker, beyond owning the product's domain. Only Rockad sets it, and it can't be bought.
• Not confirmed by the Maker is on every Unclaimed Listing: Rockad wrote it, and the people behind the Product haven't checked it.