For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. I also do a personalized pagerank biased toward the blogosphere. The likelihood your website shows up in the results is directly determined by whether real humans link to the website.
It's not a Google replacement by any measure, it's meant as a complement, but if you are looking for more in-depth content on a topic than you can find elsewhere, it's often a good starting point.
What about sites built with React, etc? Like would you be filtering out cool things like Ableton's "Learning Synths"[1] or do you mostly mean third party scripts?
Do babies go out with the bathwater? Almost certainly. But when you're running a small scale search engine, you're never going to index everything anyway, so that's entirely fine.
FWIW I think it is cool and much needed.
(also low value, perhaps :)
What's the elevator pitch? What do you actually do that is special?
From the about section:
> This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
> The software for this search engine is all custom-built, and all crawling and indexing is done in-house. The project is open source. Feel free to poke about in the source code or contribute to the development!
But that doesn't really give me much info.