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I've been following the project for a while now, and while I don't use it yet, we need it and more like it to succeed if we ever hope to loosen Google's chokeho

by imiric 5y ago

I've been following the project for a while now, and while I don't use it yet, we need it and more like it to succeed if we ever hope to loosen Google's chokehold on the web. Best of luck to you and to the project! I'm curious about a few things: 1. What's your (planned) business model? 2. Have you tried asking for sponsorships, either from companies or individuals? You should have an easy way for people to donate. I'm sure you'd have some support there, especially if your day job situation is unstable. 3. Is it just you working on it right now? Have you considered open sourcing it to get community contributions, or hiring more devs (once donations pick up or maybe someone would be willing to work on it on their free time as you do)? I can imagine that writing a search engine is a gargantuan effort, and doing it alone must be close to impossible.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
> 1. What's your (planned) business model? Dunno. In general I don't have a lot of faith in the profitability of search engines. Ads can work if you're Google-scale, the other option is subscriptions, but in that case, you need to be really good and my search engine just isn't, outside of some areas. That's actually one of my bigger design problems, how to let people understand which queries are likely to be useful. It looks like Google, and people assume it has the affordances of Google. It doesn't, and if you go in with those assumptions, you'll be disappointed. My model, as far as I've planned one, is just to keep the operation as cheap as possible and subsist on donations and maybe partnerships with other search engines. A big part of what I'm exploring is ways of doing as much as possible with low power hardware. I think rather than indexing 1 billion documents, 90% of which are garbage that will never be a good search result for any query ever, if I can index 100 million 50% of which are potentially good hits, then maybe that goes a decent way. > 2. Have you tried asking for sponsorships, either from companies or individuals? You should have an easy way for people to donate. I'm sure you'd have some support there, especially if your day job situation is unstable. I haven't really been fishing for this. I honestly didn't see having to change jobs as I am right now. I do have a donations page from before, but all of this was fairly sudden, so I haven't really gone over that whole process all too much yet. > 3. Is it just you working on it right now? Have you considered open sourcing it to get community contributions, or hiring more devs (once donations pick up or maybe someone would be willing to work on it on their free time as you do)? I can imagine that writing a search engine is a gargantuan effort, and doing it alone must be close to impossible. It's been just me up until now. Solo work can be ridiculously efficient when beginning a new project, especially when doing the sort of exploratory programming this has been. I also haven't felt I have had enough bandwidth to manage an open source project. But I am approaching a point where it's becoming a bit much to do all by myself, especially given this isn't my only project. So I am considering open sourcing it or bringing more people in, just need to think a bit about a good format for such a collaboration. It's relatively high maintenance and requires manual operations to keep going. As it stands, a lot of the code isn't trivially testable, running it (even with few documents) requires large language models and so on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 20after4 5y ago
  If you do end up open sourcing it I'm still interested in contributing. Both in form of code and also infrastructure.
- djbusby 5y ago
  There is a tasteful spot between FOsS engine and ad-support that it feels like marginila could capture. Would likely need a "ceo" type who wasn't also an MBA type to make this work.
  - mitchbob 5y ago
    Are there services that are at that "tasteful spot" now? Examples would be helpful!

by imiric 5y ago

marginalia_nu 5y ago

> 1. What's your (planned) business model? Dunno. In general I don't have a lot of faith in the profitability of search engines. Ads can work if you're Google-scale, the other option is subscriptions, but in that case, you need to be really good and my search engine just isn't, outside of some areas. That's actually one of my bigger design problems, how to let people understand which queries are likely to be useful. It looks like Google, and people assume it has the affordances of Google. It doesn't, and if you go in with those assumptions, you'll be disappointed. My model, as far as I've planned one, is just to keep the operation as cheap as possible and subsist on donations and maybe partnerships with other search engines. A big part of what I'm exploring is ways of doing as much as possible with low power hardware. I think rather than indexing 1 billion documents, 90% of which are garbage that will never be a good search result for any query ever, if I can index 100 million 50% of which are potentially good hits, then maybe that goes a decent way. > 2. Have you tried asking for sponsorships, either from companies or individuals? You should have an easy way for people to donate. I'm sure you'd have some support there, especially if your day job situation is unstable. I haven't really been fishing for this. I honestly didn't see having to change jobs as I am right now. I do have a donations page from before, but all of this was fairly sudden, so I haven't really gone over that whole process all too much yet. > 3. Is it just you working on it right now? Have you considered open sourcing it to get community contributions, or hiring more devs (once donations pick up or maybe someone would be willing to work on it on their free time as you do)? I can imagine that writing a search engine is a gargantuan effort, and doing it alone must be close to impossible. It's been just me up until now. Solo work can be ridiculously efficient when beginning a new project, especially when doing the sort of exploratory programming this has been. I also haven't felt I have had enough bandwidth to manage an open source project. But I am approaching a point where it's becoming a bit much to do all by myself, especially given this isn't my only project. So I am considering open sourcing it or bringing more people in, just need to think a bit about a good format for such a collaboration. It's relatively high maintenance and requires manual operations to keep going. As it stands, a lot of the code isn't trivially testable, running it (even with few documents) requires large language models and so on.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
20after4 5y ago
If you do end up open sourcing it I'm still interested in contributing. Both in form of code and also infrastructure.
djbusby 5y ago
There is a tasteful spot between FOsS engine and ad-support that it feels like marginila could capture. Would likely need a "ceo" type who wasn't also an MBA type to make this work.
- mitchbob 5y ago
  Are there services that are at that "tasteful spot" now? Examples would be helpful!