Simplifying the product — May 7, 2026
Hi everyone,
A small but important change at quarexnews.org: we've retired the daily city newspapers (Palm Springs, Bay Ridge, Hartford) and refocused the product on what's actually working — the on-demand "news anywhere on earth" search.
The three pre-generated daily newspapers, which appeared as buttons at the top of QuarexNews. They updated overnight and presented a structured local-news edition for each city. They're now turned off and the buttons are removed from the homepage.
Type any city, state, zip code, or country into QuarexNews and get current civic news. This is the part of the product that's been working — tested with US zip codes, international cities, even tiny communities and misspellings. It now also has a Claude Sonnet fallback behind it, so the occasional 502 timeouts users were seeing are mostly gone.
Once you enter a location, you can drill into any of these 12 topics:
And once you have an answer for any topic, click "Dig Deeper". Quarex automatically suggests three contextual follow-up questions tailored to what you just read — click any of them for more depth on that specific story or angle.
Heads up: each search does live research across web sources, so it can take 30–60 seconds to return. Be patient — the wait is the work.
Honest answer: the daily newspaper generation was expensive, and the audience for those three specific cities never materialized at the scale that justified the cost. Pre-generating a full structured edition for every category every day — whether or not anyone read it — meant we were spending real money on stories nobody opened.
The on-demand model is the right shape for this product:
This isn't QuarexNews shutting down. The site is live, the search works, the Sonnet fallback is in place. We're just trimming the part of the product that wasn't pulling its weight so the part that does can keep running.
If a daily-newspaper-style local edition ever becomes important again — for a flagship city, a partner, an election cycle — the infrastructure to generate it is still there. We just won't run it on autopilot.
— Peter