A bit too nervous to pull the trigger just yet
In general I've had like infrequent but large influx of money from the project, so it's hard to answer. Although I have relatively long runway, no small thanks to nlnet for their generous grant.
On some level it's all a gamble. Either I try to make this work somehow, or I close up shop and keep working as an office drone, because I really can't keep doing both.
My hope is that I'm able to make it work on a wikipedia-like model donation model, maybe supplemented with selling commercial API access (access is free CC-BY-NC-SA). My burn rate is literally my living expenses plus a hundred dollars per month of service costs to I don't have to be spectacularly profitable to sustain flight. ... all that is contingent on making it work quite a lot better than it does now, so I guess I have my work cut out for me.
It's also a weird project, since it's had an almost absurdly positive reaction. For example, many people develop a search engine and get almost lynched on HN for not working exactly like Google or not dealing with some query as expected. Someone found a link to my barely working search engine that didn't properly support multiple-keyword queries and this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764
I don't know you personally, but you come across as an earnest lone developer doing something for the passion of it. I think that goes a long way on here, versus someone giving off "portfolio project", "hire me" or "seeking investment" vibes. I've not really found a use case for your engine yet but I am really enjoying seeing your progress.
I have no affiliation but recently came across them from a weekly newsletter (via https://changelog.com/news/48/email).
It's very hard to read your search results. I've always disliked grid views to represent data. It's very hard to find what you want.
Im not sure. But it looks like you didn't want to copy google and wanted to make something "authentic", same reason why often modern design is unusable.
Every competitor of Google just gave up trying finding a better sexier way. DuckDuckGo, bing etc. Pure copies. A list view, with a good contrasting header is the best way to scan and find the results you want.
If you want to keep it, at least provide a list / grid switcher so users can pick themselves.
Good luck! Happy you get to pursue your passion.
I don't like the basic old school google style list though. It makes very poor use of the screen space. This is primarily a service for desktop users finding desktop content, but I still want something that's accessible to other screen sizes. Really hard to find a good design that works well.
I also really appreciate the desire to use available screen space. It irks me to no end when a site forces a narrow column of info/content and wide empty borders wasting half or more of my screen. Wikipedia recently started doing this and I can't say they're better for it in my opinion.
I do like that feature.
When a search term yields many results, it's left to the user to the user to search the results for the site that will yield the "best" match for what they're after. It seems like people assume that the better the search engine is, the better it is at predicting what the user is really after by putting it at the top of the listing. But this can be rather difficult when the original search terms are pretty generic and the user is required to scroll and check many results. If there were a way help the user sort the results based on relevant criteria, maybe that would make that search easier. And personally, I like things that give users a little more say in how they get fed information. Allow sort by popularity, frequency of search terms in page, number of pages in site's domain, date of last page edit (no idea if this is possible to get), etc...
Maybe have multiple columns of search results. One column that lists results that match all words in the query, another for only one or two words. Or maybe columns that list results that include the user's query plus likely related topics. Or a set of search refinement tools that can further help the user sort based on any number of criteria, or filter results by specific related terms.
Slightly related, I really like your encyclopedia site. In addition to being incredibly nice to use all on its own, perhaps it (from the 'See Also', 'Further Reading', 'Related articles', etc... sections) could be mined for suggesting additional search terms/info a user could add to their search or filter their results by. For example if I search for Tcl and get a bunch of results, some tools that suggested filtering (or a search instead option?) the results to those that included Tk, expect, and TclX might help me get to what I'm after quicker.
No idea if any of that is practical or would even actually be that useful in practice.
They are not my colors, but the contrast is clear!
Mobile I think the cards are to high. Slightly smaller font, and cutting of after 2-3 sentence a read more link would probably make it easier to sift through your results.
But just my random opinion, good luck!
A book, software, something. I can't quite expense patreon and others may have a similar issue. (Useful "free SaaS" where all there is is the cup of coffee button makes me sad).
My buyer won't even blink if I say that I need a $150 tool: I can just bill it to whatever project it's being used for as long as I get an invoice or a receipt or some kind of documentation. If I say that I found a free tool and I'd like to donate $10 to the author, no one will know how to do that.
https://www.marginalia.nu/marginalia-search/supporting/patre...
https://www.marginalia.nu/marginalia-search/supporting/buyme...
(the text of the links is correct though)
At 50% if you can see an upward trend, ~6 months savings, and have a plan that the time will give you to execute, got for it.
Also if you're going to quit anyway, you might as well ask the company you currently work for if they'll let you go on sabbatical, or part time, or consulting.
That can give you a bit of extra runway/feeling of security.
Dunno what you're doing wrong if you can't land a job with a built-from-scratch internet search engine on your resume.