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A comment on Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no AI, & all DDG bangs. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by UnmappedStack on Monday December 29, 2025 @03:05AM (#46418464)
This is a really interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree. So many amazing projects are truly free without the goal of profit yet their maintainers still do amazing work. I feel like part of the reason this works is because often the load is split between several maintainers (of which I hope to onboard soon, and have one or two offers already from people to contribute) and also the fact it's genuinely something enjoyable to work on (of course, to the extent it's not too stressful and overworked).
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by NitpickLawyer on Monday December 29, 2025 @03:13AM (#46418510)
There's a difference between awesome projects that don't have a recurring cost (i.e. open source software that users run themselves) and a search engine. You cannot physically run a search engine without real-world costs today. Those funds need to come from somewhere. And offering a good product at scale costs a lot of money.
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by UnmappedStack on Monday December 29, 2025 @03:16AM (#46418525)
That is very true, and it's not cheap to maintain. I do however really hope that donations can cover it enough, and I have plans about other ways to monetise it while remaining not-for-profit without ads or anything that affects the user.
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by Intermernet on Monday December 29, 2025 @09:05AM (#46420868)
Just brainstorming here, but would a distributed search index be possible / usable with current network speeds and latency? I'm not sure how to set up the data structure to not require many high latency jumps, but maybe someone has solved this problem.
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by Marsymars on Monday December 29, 2025 @11:13AM (#46422064)
It's possible, see the YaCy project. It suffer from probably a couple of orders of magnitude too few resources (in the funding/development sense) to really be competitive though.
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by YetAnotherNick on Monday December 29, 2025 @04:43AM (#46418984)
Examples? If you are going to say something like linux, almost every developer gets paid to contribute to linux(I remember 95% commits have company attribution). Same with postgres etc.
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by ranguna on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:32AM (#46419211)
They are paid, but the end used doesn't pay.
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by YetAnotherNick on Monday December 29, 2025 @08:33AM (#46420561)
End user are corporate linux users and they pay for maintenance? Perhaps you mean all the end users doesn't pay.
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Re:Show HN: My not-for-profit search engine with no ads, no ... by ranguna on Friday January 09, 2026 @04:32AM (#46551835)
They don't pay to the full group of Linux devs, they pay to companies like redhat, which does not represent the Linux kernel dev community.
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