emosenkis

Some companies don't prohibit side projects... My current employer typically allows them if not related to the company's areas of business.

Are you working on expanding beyond US nonprofits? That would be a requirement for competing with Benevity for customers that are multinational corporations.

Any chance of providing a donations API? This sort of no-fee approach would be amazing for building all sorts of charity-focused apps, from walkathons to nonprofit crowdfunding campaigns, public matching campaigns etc. The minimal functionality would just be to allow a site to direct a user to a page that allows them to complete a grant for a particular amount to a specific nonprofit and receive a callback when the grant is submitted.

To elaborate on another comment: Jewish law is seldom concerned with absolute certainty; it much more often is a question of degrees of doubt. In many cases two disjoint causes for reasonable doubt about facts that would impact the whether a certain action is forbidden are sufficient to render it permitted. When coming from a mindset of mathematical/logical proof, it can seem like "fuzzy logic" or, as you said, innumerate, but in actuality it's typically more like a hypothesis and the body of evidence that supports it (and depending on the specific hypothesis, a higher or lower degree of certainty may be considered sufficient).

That's correct; I updated my original comment to mention that the Jewish laws of the sabbath aren't meant to apply to non-Jews (there is, however, a large and rather entertaining body of practical discussion of under what conditions, and how explicitly, one can ask a non-Jew to do things on the sabbath that would be forbidden for the asker themself to do).

I'm still not sure what distinction you think I made... what I intended was: 1. All Jews are people 2. Computers are not people 3. Therefore computers are not Jews

As a Jewish citizen of both Israel and the US, I understand that it can be hard to exist as a minority in your own country, and I'm sure it's harder in Israel, which doesn't have separation of religion & state.

Sorry if I came across as apopleptic - I'm mostly not at all confident that most gentiles or secular Jews would readily identify it as satire - when I clicked on the link, I expected to see something real.

As on Orthodox Jew, while I don't have anything against this and it sounds like a fun hobby project, I don't like that it misleads regarding what Jewish law actually requires.

As several others have mentioned, there is absolutely no problem with keeping a server running on the sabbath - computers aren't Jews (Jewish law only expects Jews to keep the sabbath). If it's Jews working to generate the electricity (most "modern" or "yeshivish" Orthodox Jews don't believe this is a problem; I don't know what fraction of "ultra-" Orthodox Jews disagree with that), any public cloud outside of Israel should suffice. If you're concerned with electricity, why not worry that Jews may be working to maintain the server's internet connection (again, this is trivially solved by not hosting it in Israel - all it takes is a non-Jewish majority to provide a reasonable presumption that the workers probably aren't Jewish)?

If you're worried about Jewish users accessing it on the sabbath (in my opinion the least far-fetched concern, but not one addressed by the site), the complete solution would be to shut it down for ~49 hours every week starting from ~sunset on Friday in east Asia - this doesn't require using batteries or really anything special about the site's hardware or even software.

Finally, why call it a 'kosher' search engine when almost anyone interested in such a thing would understand that as being about filtering the search results?

Edit: If you assume that using electricity and/or internet that are maintained by Jews on the sabbath is a problem, I guess you might be able to make a case for avoiding indexing sites in Israel or at all during the sabbath, since then you'd be benefitting indirectly from the work of the Jews that maintained the infrastructure - however, I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of the internet is not served using infrastructure actively supported by Jews during the sabbath so even assuming you're concerned about this, the final answer would probably still be that indexing during the sabbath is fine.