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. B

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.