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
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.
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.
It's not just on HN either. The project was mentioned in The New Yorker and I've done interviews with German radio. Just the weirdest stuff's been happening since basically day one.
It has a nostalgic feel about it. Not just the visual design, but how it wont answer questions but it will look for terms. Sometimes you want a less algorithmic engine. Takes me back to my first messing around with dialup in 1994.
In case you want to explore additional ways to extend your runway, there is the STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/challenges/ where they claim to offer €65,000 up to a maximum of €300,000 in funding to FOSS projects.
I do find it a bit strange you "punish modern design", while your own design is very hard to read. I'm not sure you made up that quote, or someone on HN did.
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.
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.
For whatever it's worth, I personally like the screenshots of the pages that shows up when you browse random; I think it really helps in recognizing a site you may have been to before. If there were a way to incorporate that into all search results, along with a more information dense listing, I for one would find that quite useful. Kind of a 'I can't remember what it was called, but I'd recognize it if I saw it' sort of thing.
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.
Just echoing this. I was looking for a site the other day, and I thought I'd use marginalia since it throws up interesting stuff in general, and the site I was looking for had a distinctive look that I knew I would recognise again ... and was disappointed the "magazine stand" view was only for the random sites.
As far as layout is concerned, if you don't mind me brainstorming some ideas, I'll share some thoughts.
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.
I like the list view on desktop, I would maybe make the title slightly larger to have a stronger contrast with the description.
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.
If nothing else, you could open with just a Patreon or something. Basically as a way of outsourcing the "subscription revenue" implementation until such time as something direct yourself makes sense.
Please sell something business-like that people can purchase and expense.
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.
I recommend saying 'Patreon' instead of 'Donate' on the site's main navigation menu! It does have a stronger effect because they'll associate it with a human being behind the screen.
You have my pittance! Your search engine is useful to me for recipes and that crazy cyberpunk network of back-alley Geocities-esque pages it's tapped into
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