searchmysite.net

The first paid listing for searchmysite.net has been made. The paid listing option was enabled just under two weeks ago.

While money isn't the primary motivator for the project, it does factor into it because my main objectives are to make a useful and sustainable service, and to demonstrate that there is a viable alternative to the advertising driven search engine model.

So this means the idea might just work.

I've written about how much searchmysite.net has cost over the past 6 months, and how much it may cost to keep going in future:

https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-the-delicate-matter-of-the-bill/

Short summary is that it is (perhaps) surprisingly expensive to run a search engine and search as a service.

The good news is that there is a plan to try to pay running costs (without resorting to advertising). To that end the paid listing option is now live.

Further details, including:

Why aren’t other search engines open source?
What open source licence is it?
Why is it on GitHub?
What are the future plans?
How can I contribute?

Are in the post at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-is-now-open-source/

This featured a number of key changes following feedback on the first version:

1. "Pre-loading" the search index with several hundred personal websites, so the results set will be much richer from the outset.
2. Allowing site submissions from non-verified site owners, so the search index can grow more quickly.
3. Improving the relevancy tuning, so that that it can continue returning good results from a much larger and potentially more noisy search index.
4. Redesigning the Search and Browse pages, to facilitate navigation of considerably more sites.
5. Upgrading the servers, to allow it to cope with the larger indexing load and index size.

Further details in the post at https://michael-lewis.com/posts/searchmysite.net-update-seeding-and-scaling/ .