Bravo: this is the first time I've seen you publicly acknowledge that they exist. Baby steps!

You know them well enough to invite them to a private party at your office. Do you know the CO2stats people better, given that you're including a cross-site web-bug javascript from them that frequently blocks the site's page rendering?

It's a few hundred bytes of <form>, you could remove it later if they flamed out with the same ridiculous ease with which you could add it.

Searchyc is at least as reliable if not more reliable than HN, I think you'd be in pretty good hands there.

In all the time that I've been using it I think I've seen it down only twice, HN over the same period numerous times.

HN handles considerably more traffic than SearchYC.

Well, that's a difficult one: Either PG is right and nobody needs search, then we'll find it doesn't matter, or I'm right and we do need search and then the searchyc guys will need to beef up their system.

But then at least we do know for sure we need that search.

As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.

If you got a lot more traffic because YC would anoint you the 'official' YC search engine would you be able to handle it?

Would you commit to beefing up the system to whatever it took?

Well, no. SearchYC has no revenue. I maintain SearchYC and host it out of a box in my closet as a service to the community. It doesn't make any sense for me to commit to do "whatever it takes".

That being said, with a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and some software changes, SearchYC should be able to gracefully handle a couple orders of magnitude more traffic.

Consider yourself funded if it should come to that.