MarginaliaSearch VS Yacy

> I think a larger concern is how you'll address the Bus Factor going forward

I can't speak to how much energy it is to go from code to serving requests, but FWIW the code is AGPLv3 and seems to be updated regularly https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/v2...

Regarding the last sentence: The problem is that capitalism knows no limits. Sure, it would be nice to pay a monthly subscription for genuinely good and desirable content/search results...

But what if the CEO of the service provider needs another $5m bonus? What if the stock needs to go up so that the shareholder gamblers can get more dividend paid? What if all of a sudden the service gets bought out?

The truth is that what you are seeking is more likely to come from someone who is just passionate about it with not that much motivation based on profit. That doesn't mean that this entity or person can't be financially supported but it gets problematic when profit is the _main_ incentive.

For a good example of an interesting search engine built by a single guy, see Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/

Have you heard of https://www.marginalia.nu/ in general, and especially the https://search.marginalia.nu/ from there?

There's a decent amount of people still keeping the fire burning for the "old web." It takes a little digging, but it's out there.

Some links for you:

* https://wiby.me/ — search engine that emphasizes simple/plain/hobbyist pages. Try the "surprise me" link a few times.

* https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ — article, "Rediscovering the Small Web"

* https://search.marginalia.nu/ — author (hangs out on HN sometimes, too (marginalia_nu)

Actually, here's a link to a similar discussion on an old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783391

I built a recipe detector. You can, you know, train some sort of AI model to do this like with fasttext, or maybe do naive bayesian inference, but as it turns out, you can also:

https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/ma...

It works annoyingly well.

For some values of "nobody"; this westerner enjoys https://search.marginalia.nu (in addition to more common engines) and has high hopes for the new site browser:

Result ranking takes a lot of variables, and factors like excessive tracking and affiliate links is one of them in my search engine.

You can poke around in the result valuation code here: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/ma...

#1 cause in the decline of Google maybe. https://search.marginalia.nu/ seems to manage though, so maybe Google just doesn't care.

Congratulations on shipping.

I see a lot of focus on startups, AI tools, productivity hacks, tech stacks, etc. What audience do you have in mind? I personally find that the most interesting sites on HN are outside of your scope here (examples: https://ciechanow.ski/, https://neal.fun/, https://search.marginalia.nu/).

It turns out you can make it all the way to become president of Harvard [1] while ignoring this rule so it is questionable whether it is as set in stone as you make it out to be, at least in certain disciplines.

In a way these models are a perfect mirror of the current academic climate. They plagiarise without remorse, they follow the latest identity-politics diktat to a point and make up 'facts' when needed to reach a desired narrative. Google Gemini is the latest example [2] of where this leads.

Given that it is plausible that models like these will soon be used in educational settings this is a recipe for disaster. The same goes for the trend to replace search engine results with 'interpreted' results in which LLMs take up the same role as Winston in 1984: Winston works in the Ministry of Truth where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party.

It is time for a decentralised distributed search engine which limits itself to pure search, something like YaCy [3]. Something to replace Winstonian search engines like Google and Bing (et al.).

[1] https://www.campusreform.org/article/claudine-gay-is-a-dei-h...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465255

[3] https://yacy.net/

> Now I just need some kind of open source search engine to run on it ...

Here you go: https://yacy.net

I remember https://yacy.net/ but the big problem of this project was java and had not implementations in others languages. I mean it as imagine torrent was only in perl.

Admarus is similar as Yacy but aims to be distributed where Yacy is federated. Both are made for the web

You should check out https://yacy.net: a global, P2P web search engine, where each peer can build and share its own index, etc.

I also have an instance of Yacy installed, which I use to index the entire system, giving me my own private, internal search engine.