[UnmappedStack]

This is a really interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree. So many amazing projects are truly free without the goal of profit yet their maintainers still do amazing work. I feel like part of the reason this works is because often the load is split between several maintainers (of which I hope to onboard soon, and have one or two offers already from people to contribute) and also the fact it's genuinely something enjoyable to work on (of course, to the extent it's not too stressful and overworked).

[NitpickLawyer]

There's a difference between awesome projects that don't have a recurring cost (i.e. open source software that users run themselves) and a search engine. You cannot physically run a search engine without real-world costs today. Those funds need to come from somewhere. And offering a good product at scale costs a lot of money.

[Intermernet]

Just brainstorming here, but would a distributed search index be possible / usable with current network speeds and latency? I'm not sure how to set up the data structure to not require many high latency jumps, but maybe someone has solved this problem.

[UnmappedStack]

That is very true, and it's not cheap to maintain. I do however really hope that donations can cover it enough, and I have plans about other ways to monetise it while remaining not-for-profit without ads or anything that affects the user.

[YetAnotherNick]

Examples? If you are going to say something like linux, almost every developer gets paid to contribute to linux(I remember 95% commits have company attribution). Same with postgres etc.

[ranguna]

They are paid, but the end used doesn't pay.