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Comment by amenod | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic [0]: I would be very interested in an economic model that would work for such a search engine. Donations are fine, but (imho) it will take much more than that to keep the lights on, let alone expand...

The "fairest" solution for both sides I can think of is ads which no not send tracking information, and are shown primarily based on search terms and country, or even other parameters that the visitor has set explicitly. Any other ideas on how to finance such an engine so that incentives are aligned?

[0]: EDIT: off-topic because the page clearly states that this project will be financed with donations only.

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Aren't ads super ineffective, especially when you don't make them very invasive?

I think donations are probably workable. It works in the private tracker scene; the larger ones have "donation meters" and never seem to fall behind.

It could also work on a subscription model which is essentially just formalizing the donations and making it easier to plan cash flow.

Yes, I think a subscription model is the way to go.

The model my search uses is for the public search to essentially be a loss leader for the search as a service - site owners can pay a small fee to access extra features such as being able to configure what is indexed, trigger reindexing on demand, etc. It also heavily downranks pages with adverts, to try to eliminate the incentive for spamdexing.

Ads as a business model ends with surveillance as a business model. We know this now.

> but (imho) it will take much more than that to keep the lights on, let alone expand...

You'd be surprised how cheap a search engine can be to operate. My search.marginalia.nu has a burn rate of less than $100/month.

Impressive! Does that include the startup costs of the server you bought, and maintaining it?

The hardware cost about $5k all-in-all including a UPS, and I'd estimate it will chew through an 1Tb SSD once every 12-18 months.

Wikimedia has an estimated $157m in donations this year. If we could get a small fraction of this amount we should be able to build something pretty good.

Get real lol. Why would a general public care about you? Happy to donate but it won’t keep the light on. You’re serving a niche community

Niche for now, but I think a lot of people can see the value of search without ads.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

I wish you luck, but I mean, I use Google and I haven’t seen a search ad for what, a decade (okay, less than a decade considering iOS)? Most people who don’t want to see search ads can pretty easily find an ad blocker.

Online encyclopedia was very niche when Wikipedia started.

I mean, it's not even remotely comparable. It's not like we have to look at paper search engines as an alternative to online search engines. The whole point is that the general public has no real reason to switch, never mind donate.

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