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.

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.

I wish wrappers would stop being called search engines. Google is a search engine, and so is Bing, and Yandex, and Marginalia Search. DDG, Brave, Nilch, and Kagi are search interfaces, or search coats of paint.

Searching “ causes an error

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

Many projects start as thin layers over existing infrastructure and only later take on the hard parts as resources allow. Being explicit about that roadmap feels like the right tradeoff early on.

  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

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!

Clicked to give it a try, only to be greeted with this LLM authorship trope.

If "sick of AI", rehumanize the slogan?

And carry on! "We were there" when DDG and Kagi got started; hope you enjoy carving a niche as well.

// Yes, LLMs learned it from SEO and marketing slop predating LLMs, but the "No A, No B, Just C" association is too dominant for your brand.