Comment by Imustaskforhelp

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago

7 replies

Awesome project, I have a quick suggestion but can you please make adding custom ddg bangs into your project itself rather quickly?

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!

Leftium a day ago

(replying to dead reply downthread)

Kagi (custom) bangs[1] already supports `!cobalt <youtube video>`

I just added !cobalt to my custom bangs as `https://cobalt.meowing.de#%s`, and it works.

Kagi also accepts new public bangs: https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs#contribution-guidelines

Kagi bangs are free for everyone (a subscription is required for custom bangs and regular search).

- Example of how to use Kagi bangs without subscription: https://kagi.com/search?q=!chatgpt+TEST

- https://zbang.leftium.com/ uses Kagi bangs under the hood.

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#custom-bangs

  • Imustaskforhelp 19 hours ago

    Oh thanks for sharing but it seems I would still need to get kagi if I wanted to do !cobalt and I just wanted it to be something which can be used by just about anybody. (Imagine seeing someone downloading something on shitty website and being like oh let me help you and boom)

    I think kagi's nice but this is some real pain which I feel like could be solved via nilch with not much pain as well.

    Perhaps you can add the cobalt bang to kagi's global list so that people like us who don't use Kagi can use it as well too since the bangs are free for everyone.

UnmappedStack 2 days ago

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!

prmoustache 2 days ago

Ecosia is still making money (that it uses to plant trees). That means it is selling something and we can reasonnably think that is your data/privacy.