It’s possibly worth pointing out that the about page doesn’t offer any indicator that this is an actual nonprofit entity from a legal standpoint, so at this point I have to assume it’s just a sole proprietorship that is pinky promising to become a non-profit.

In that sense I’m quite happy “donating” to Kagi to provide a stable and supported product from a company with employees.

I am convinced LLMs are the way forward for searching, with a caveat: what they summarize isn't very relevant (it is overrated). It just gives a (hopefully accurate) semantic context. What matters is the sources it directs to. These are your links normally on top of ypur search query.

I strongly disagree with this. IMO developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible within the rules they think that should be followed (and those that are mandatory ofc).

Profit is not only by far the strongest motivating factor for others to adopt your set of rules, but also a guarantee to your community that the product will still be around in a few years and not turn into a rug pull because its developer is burned out after working 80 hour weeks for months or even years for less than minimum wage. It is also something you can trade for your values, e.g. offering great working conditions to your employees or funding projects or lobbying for laws you think will benefit society.

Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.

Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.

Why don't YOU commercialize your fork of their service, and use the proceeds to hire developers to maintain the code? That would be infinitely more useful than armchair criticism of others.

No, they still pay fair wage, and I would trust it more if it pays fair wage to people spending their time on the project(including the creator).

My point being that it's a mountain to climb, and just because those at the top have already climbed it doesn't translate into everyone being able to climb it. It takes a whole lot of effort and probably some public grants, but getting those public grants is a whole different skill set than actually building the thing. And you can only get a public grant after you've already created something useful, so your idea of a non-profit quickly turns into an inescable hole in your pocket that you're desperately trying to fill for at least a year or two.

This is why while our lists might vary, every single one of us can only name like 5, maybe 10 non-profits that have "made it" (however we define that success).

All that said, go set up a reocurring $2/month donation to your favourite non-profit right now. Whether you choose Wikimedia or something else, I'm sure it's well worth 10% of a monthly subscription you're already paying for an LLM or whatever. Unlike your for-profit subscriptions, if the money becomes tight you can always cancel these without losing anything.

Profit from advertising is highly corrosive and corrupts everyone it touches (social networks, your tube, search etc etc).

I miss the days when someone would make a service where the user would benefit as much as possible and the creator got compensated fairly. I feel like that system worked for hundreds of years. It’s only in the last couple decades that we’ve made this obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.

I am also a fan of DDG bangs and I see two missing features:

1. DDG supports bangs at any place in the query (even in the middle of it). I can search "topic !wiki" and it will work as expected.

2. DDG also supports following the first result in a query if a bare '!' is present in the query. Searching " hacker news !" will land me in the actual website without having to click anything in the results page.

Maybe you can consider adding these.

There was this project on hackernews which was recently shown where they (scraped?) the internet and then created an really efficient embedding of the search engine. I wish if you could look more into it or contact the creator of that project perhaps.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878151 (Show HN: Building a web search engine from scratch with 3B neural embeddings)

Looks like https://search.wilsonl.in/ they have since then closed the live demo but I had used it when it was live and in my opinion, it was a mix of that if things needed some improvements but that it was also usable for some things which were in the dataset (Of course you wouldn't get Organic chemistry questions/answers for high schoolers as an example in there but you will find most things (usually wikipedia) and then some good sources, usually the ones popular but it was really cool overall so perhaps you can look more into it and helps

Now I really love your project a lot and I think there should be not for profit search engines, but I am a little worried about using it since if I use it as my search engine, then it might cost you a lot of money (using the brave api) .

I just searched and it seems that ecosia is a non profit as well so you can definitely partner up with them, I remember a post about qwant and ecosia partnering up to create an independent search engine.

I think that there should be competition within the search engine space especially via non profits in a way similar to wikipedia one might say ideally. Wishing you the best for this project's future!

I'll have a look into that project, thank you. Cost is a slight issue so far, yes. There have been about 4,000 searches in the past couple days but I've slightly improved cost efficiency with caching, and I've received two small donations which do help a bit, so the hope is that donations will be able to sustain it.

Partnering with Ecosia is a really interesting idea, however I think that there may be a conflict of interest since they do aim to make money with ads, just to go towards environmental efforts rather than a corporation. They would be disadvantaged if nilch was at an advantage over their users.

I do love the wikipedia model and I hope that nilch can run similarly. Thank you again!

Searching “ causes an error

https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Input_Validat...

  Error loading search results. Please try again.

  SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected keyword at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

Edit: It's actually unrelated to the search term, I get this for anything I search for. I'm using Vivaldi Android with adblocker on, maybe that's the problem.

  SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

And these algorithms should be open source and we should be able to pick our own and mash them.

Related:

Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm: A Blueprint

https://blog.mozilla.ai/build-your-own-timeline-algorithm-a-...