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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They are paid, but the end used doesn't pay.

End user are corporate linux users and they pay for maintenance? Perhaps you mean all the end users doesn't pay.

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.

As far as I'm aware, Ecosia does sell ads.

This is sadly probably quite true. I'm sure there are workarounds, like slightly changing it every month or two, although that would require quite heavy maintenance. Perhaps the core algorithm stays the same but some constants that decide on the weights of different things are randomised? Not too sure.

I see nilch as slightly more about being simplistic and not having many features that are unnecessary. I do share many of the values and benefits with searxng (and really love their work!), however this is also about my own specific desire for something that is clean and has very little that is unnecessary.

You don't need to touch any of the "unnecessary" features in SearXNG, it's as simple as any search engine, just write your query into the input and look at the results

Thank you! I would definitely consider custom ddg bangs, yes. Is there any particular reason you want that rather than just all ddg's bangs like it is currently?

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!

I'm not too sure what you mean. I kinda just avoided looking at existed implementations because it's a bit more interesting to do it myself.

Mostly just because C is a lot simpler, and in kernel dev, simplicity is everything. I've used rust for other projects but I feel like in kernel dev I would much rather use a simple and readable language than a safe language.

Hi, I use DoomGeneric which is a portable fork of Doom. It's on a TempFS loaded from an initrd. I use doom1.wad.

Yeah mmap is quite a stub lol, I def cheated on that. I just wanted framebuffer access, but the user heap uses sbrk internally instead of mmap anyway so I properly

I think the thing is, Doom was originally written __for__ DOS. Part of the cool part is porting 3rd party software to my OS that wasn't originally written for it. That was part of my reasoning at least.