4 ms·

dang, I hope having the "Ask HN" prefix is OK here. It's basically a very long lead-up to the actual Ask HN question: Would you be willing to pay for the creat

dang, I hope having the "Ask HN" prefix is OK here. It's basically a very long lead-up to the actual Ask HN question: Would you be willing to pay for the creation of search index data files? (But for people to have an opinion, I thought that some context is needed)

fsflover 5y ago
> Would you be willing to pay for the creation of search index data files? Those can also be created by crowdsourcing: https://yacy.net https://yacy.net.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  Fully agree. With an open file format, people using yacy to create their own index would be welcome and actually help all of us towards having better search. But I believe that for kicking off such a project, it first needs to exceed a critical mass of search coverage on mainstream targets. That's why I am interested to see if it could be executed while being financially self-sufficient. Taking on VCs early would probably undermine the project, so bootstrapping seems like the way to go. And that means you need paying customers from day 1. Relying on friendly volunteers, on the other hand, seems like quite the risky strategy. EDIT: BTW, looking at their screenshots, it looks like Yacy is planning for a very different scale. I was actually considering indexing pages in the 10mio to 50mio URL range. But all their screenshots show <10K URLs, so that would be mostly niche results.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    < But all their screenshots show <10K URLs, so that would be mostly niche results. Those are just demonstrations. According to the live stats, >10mio URLs is totally possible: https://yacy.searchlab.eu/Network.html https://yacy.searchlab.eu/Network.html.
    - fxtentacle 5y ago
      It appears that you're the only one who read the text and commented, so apparently interest for federated search is very low on HN.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        It might also be that it was just a bad timing. A large number of submissions do not get to the main page just due to a bad luck. Later, some of them are resubmitted and get the deserved attention. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool.
fxtentacle 5y ago
In case someone else wonders in the future. Apparently, submitting it like this, it did not show up in https://news.ycombinator.com/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/ask
- fsflover 5y ago
  This page is only for submissions without links (AFAIK even if they do not have "Ask HN").

fsflover 5y ago

> Would you be willing to pay for the creation of search index data files? Those can also be created by crowdsourcing: https://yacy.net https://yacy.net.

fxtentacle 5y ago
Fully agree. With an open file format, people using yacy to create their own index would be welcome and actually help all of us towards having better search. But I believe that for kicking off such a project, it first needs to exceed a critical mass of search coverage on mainstream targets. That's why I am interested to see if it could be executed while being financially self-sufficient. Taking on VCs early would probably undermine the project, so bootstrapping seems like the way to go. And that means you need paying customers from day 1. Relying on friendly volunteers, on the other hand, seems like quite the risky strategy. EDIT: BTW, looking at their screenshots, it looks like Yacy is planning for a very different scale. I was actually considering indexing pages in the 10mio to 50mio URL range. But all their screenshots show <10K URLs, so that would be mostly niche results.
- fsflover 5y ago
  < But all their screenshots show <10K URLs, so that would be mostly niche results. Those are just demonstrations. According to the live stats, >10mio URLs is totally possible: https://yacy.searchlab.eu/Network.html https://yacy.searchlab.eu/Network.html.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    It appears that you're the only one who read the text and commented, so apparently interest for federated search is very low on HN.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      It might also be that it was just a bad timing. A large number of submissions do not get to the main page just due to a bad luck. Later, some of them are resubmitted and get the deserved attention. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool.

fxtentacle 5y ago

In case someone else wonders in the future. Apparently, submitting it like this, it did not show up in https://news.ycombinator.com/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

fsflover 5y ago
This page is only for submissions without links (AFAIK even if they do not have "Ask HN").