5 ms·
Alright, how about an honest-to-goodness new search engine? I've been working on this piecemeal for a while. I want a completely new alternative in the search
by thaumaturgy 6y ago
Alright, how about an honest-to-goodness new search engine?
I've been working on this piecemeal for a while. I want a completely new alternative in the search space. I think a lot of other people do too. I want to focus on highly personalized results from personal data sets: ingest people's bookmarks, crawl them, crawl their second-order links, and so on. I want discussions from HN, Reddit, and other publicly-accessible, heavily-moderated, active sites to frequently appear in search results. I want search results to be rendered in a modern, interactive interface that makes lists-of-links feel like 2010.
I resolutely do not want advertising revenue. For early stages at least, I'd like to keep it subscription-only. I know that is a big, big limiting factor to growth. I think there could be some other opportunities for revenue that don't require bending over for advertising. I could be open to other suggestions too.
I've got some approaches to try for ranking, I have most of a crawler, I've compiled lists of openly available datasets and shortcuts, a start on the frontend and backend, and great piles of notes and pieces from past experiments. I'm absolutely certain this is doable for a very small team.
I don't have any of the business side. I don't have any connections. I'm mostly pleasant and easy to get along with, and I can comfortably handle groups of technical or non-technical people. But, I have no idea how to find and make the kind of relationships that could get this built much faster, and even posting this here makes me awkward and uncomfortable. Maybe this is a good year for breaking bad old habits.
I'm currently doing freelance work at middling rates, living cheaply, and slowly chipping away at this project. I'd love to be able to work on it full time. I'm pretty sure I can build the entire stack, end-to-end, to MVP in about a year.
I'd really like to meet a good partner for the business side of things. Someone with strong ethics, that gets incensed when trying to find anything in Google or DDG, that sees value in building a whole new dataset rather than putting a new frontend on Bing, and can come up with the resources to accelerate the project. I'd be willing to consider YC if you think you can tip the odds in our favor. I don't have anything that would prevent me from committing to YC this year. But, again: no advertising.
Email in profile. I can receive mail pretty reliably, but replying to Gmail-owned infrastructure has been hit and miss recently.
- mmmateo 6y agoThat sounds amazing, best of luck. I’ve always wondered why “a billion search results” is considered valuable when nobody looks past the first page of google.
- Volrath89 6y agolooks promising, good luck
- jamil7 6y agoI'm not the person for this but the description of this project and your vision for it is extremely reminisent of an ongoing project of a good friend of mine. So much so that I had to double check your profile. He's also been chipping away at this for as long as I've known him. I will pass on your details.
- thaumaturgy 6y agoPlease do, thanks!
- buckybadger14 6y agohave a demo?
- ddorian43 6y agoI think skip crawling the internet and do just the "personal search engine" thing, and then merge with bing-api or something. Otherwise, have you really thought how'd you do distributed crawler & storage/cpu/ram/bandwidth for it ? What will you be using for search-engine ?