yup this is definitely alot like how it used to be.
@unpopularop cant find "all quiet on the western front book movie differences". well you couldn't do that with AltaVista either in 1998.
however if you just type "all quiet on the western front" you get a ton of niche obscure sites talking about it. literally someone's personal blog page.
type in 'polytopes' you get a bunch of universities papers and code sites.
"rust generics" - again, its a bunch of mailing list discussions, blogs, rust discussion groups, personal websites, obscure professional discussions.
this IS how it was back in the day.
my only question is how could this possibly be sustainable financially in the long run.
> my only question is how could this possibly be sustainable financially in the long run.
For now I'm funded by grants and donations, got a few years runway that way.
The actual operational cost is like $100/month for colocation + personal expenses so what money comes in lasts a surprisingly long time. In the future, we'll see. There does seem to be a lot of people that want this type of thing to exist though, so the hope is if I polish it even more, further funding will become available from likeminded people, possibly selling API access to other search engines.
Search is notoriously hard to make money from (outside of ads), though not having a lot of expenses seems like a reasonable path to go.
It sounds like you only need one person (not as deep pocketed as Andrew Carnegie but who has read "gospel of wealth" and agrees with it) to have support for decades if not perpetuity.
Universities traditionally have done this sort of thing by playing golf and naming buildings, but I'm sure in the 21st century there are other models. (Fwiw $2k/yr is below a typical golf membership)
I think as long as you're not setting out to start a tech company with thousands of employees, or branch out into a sector with the word "cloud" in it, you'll be fine. Only unreasonably big ambitions cost billions.
A project is usually on the road to success when it starts with a disclaimer like "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu".
I think a larger concern is how you'll address the Bus Factor going forward.
I recently put some effort into making it possible to run and host the system fairly easily[1]. That said, serving basic search data and operating a search engine is two different things. To do more than index a couple of blogs you inevitably need a fairly deep understanding of the system, probably decent hardware, and so on.
But the long term goal is that this is something that's relatively easy to operate and extend.
@unpopularop cant find "all quiet on the western front book movie differences". well you couldn't do that with AltaVista either in 1998.
however if you just type "all quiet on the western front" you get a ton of niche obscure sites talking about it. literally someone's personal blog page.
type in 'polytopes' you get a bunch of universities papers and code sites.
"rust generics" - again, its a bunch of mailing list discussions, blogs, rust discussion groups, personal websites, obscure professional discussions.
this IS how it was back in the day.
my only question is how could this possibly be sustainable financially in the long run.