I've just seen your article[1] about business model. Do you think ads will be more sustainable than a subscription-based model? Since a lot of people that will use your search engine know how a computer works (i.e., they know something other than Google), it's fair to assume most of them will have an ad-blocker. Furthermore, ads are counter-productive for a service where you want to have the best result as fast as possible; people won't be looking at ads, or ads will be so intrusive the service will decline in quality (see Google). Did you do some research since the article?

From what I've heard, the UK is pretty big on surveillance. How do the laws impact the "non-tracking" part of the service?

[1]: https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/12/frequently-asked-questions-a...

We made product and business progress since that article. Currently we make more revenue from our API than Ads. Wehave other revenue streams in place and planned. Can't diagree with your points at all. We see Ads as part of the picture; contextual ads only of course. We stand totally against surveillance based Ads [0].

No impact of UK laws, at least yet. That might change for us and every other search engine/service with UK users, but recent indications are encouraging on search, if not social media [1]. Our take on anonymity here [2].

[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/07/time-to-ban-surveillance-bas...

[1] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/08/online-safety-our-feedback-t...

[2] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/10/in-defence-of-online-anonymi...

Thanks for being here Colin, that says a lot about your commitment to the product :)

I will take a look at your API as I'm currently doing my own thing using Common Crawl + some perl (yeah... perl) scripts, but that's quite expensive to maintain.

(Founder of Neeva here) Colin -- huge congratulations on the 5B milestone. Crawling the web, building and serving a large index, and powering your own ranking is not for the faint of heart. Great job!