on·ton [pronounced “awn-tawn”] [ˈɑntʰɑn]

What is an onton?

We take what exists to be all and only metaphysical or ontological simples beyond which distinction is impossible. We term these "ontons".

Ontons may be the fields composing the fundamental particles of standard quantum mechanics, namely those of
quarks, leptons, and bosons, and the like. However, given the unending nature of the refinements made to empirical inquiry over the centuries and even over the past few decades, it is likely that those particles we consider fundamental are not truly fundamental after all. Thus, we define ontons as being whatever the most fundamental units of being actually are. Whether or not we have observed them directly, we cannot know.

TLDR - The smallest unit of being possible, beyond which distinction is impossible.

What in the gobbledegook does that mean?

Our search engine tries to understand the essence of every piece of information it ingests. That way, we can give you perfect results.

Onton’s origin

It’s a word created by Alex Gunnarson (Co-Founder) that stems from “Ontology”. We’ve used it internally for quite some time.

Examples of onton

Let’s say you had one of those nice couches you can find on onton.com (formerly shopdeft.com), and you extract an atom from it. Split it, grab a neutron, open that, and you’ll find three quarks. Either all those quarks are ontons, or you’ll have to split a quark open to eventually, maybe, find an onton somewhere down there — but we’ll never really know if we’ve reached the “bottom level”.

But... I liked Deft!

I know. We did too, but it’s always been a sort of love-hate relationship. Here’s a short list of reasons.

• Shopdeft.com is not very memorable.

• The name spoken without strong enunciation caused people to mishear it as “shop deaf” or “shop death.”

• There is another company named Deft that our users have occasionally confused us with.

• We could not easily get a shorter domain for Deft for the above reason.

Even with the love-hate relationship, it’s had a special place in our hearts as the original name. However, we’ve outgrown it!

Why Onton and why now?

At the beginning of our story, we wanted to make e-commerce agile and quick, precisely what the name (Shop Deft) represented. We haven’t lost sight of that vision; we’ve looked further.

“Onton” is fun. It’s agile and quick (to pronounce). More importantly, it’s accurate and trustworthy.

The internet is a messy place. Years of search engine optimization (SEO) and misaligned incentives (e.g. advertising) have made information retrieval difficult and the output increasingly untrustworthy.

This is especially true in e-commerce, where entire categories of searches have been so over-SEO’d and over-advertised that searching them on Google and Amazon is essentially useless. As a result, today, the average shopper can spend upwards of 79 days making a purchase decision! Crazy right?

And it’s only getting worse. Over the past four years, the amount of time it takes for someone to make a purchase decision online has increased by 9 days.

For all the impressive feats of large language models (LLMs), they end up compounding the pain points of e-commerce. LLMs generate tons (exabytes) of unstructured, unverified data daily, and the tools at shoppers’ disposal today are neither prepared nor incentivized to deal with it. The burden then falls on the customer (like you, dear reader) to separate fact from fiction.

Some platforms have begun plugging in AI models like GPT, Llama, and Claude (LLMs) to try fighting fire with fire. Still, the computer science adage of “garbage in, garbage out” applies: you can’t shortcut your way to better search by adding an “intuition” layer on top of bad data.

Merely organizing the world’s information isn’t enough to deal with this paradigm shift, and the advertising model doesn’t incentivize the changes that need to be made. Search engines need a revolution.

Our mission at Onton is to lead that revolution. We’re parsing the web at a fundamental level — down to the ontons, you might say! — to create trustworthy, accurate search, and we’ve started with the most troubled search category: e-commerce.