The screenshot is bad enough that I can’t tell if this is a troll where they took a picture of the back of one, or where they actually collected that much dog hair for a joke photo.

Yeah. The companies you mentioned are rare novelties because they chose to advertise very little. That means the thing that is normal is when a company advertises. Ergo, having a good reputation usually requires marketing.

Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit

Its a big list of major assumptions by someone who never bothered to verify if they’re even true. He’s mad he had to work with a heavily marketed product that his boss liked, and wrote this about it. Check out this quote from the article;

And the really fun part is that “astroturfing” a thread about your product on Hacker News or Reddit is just about impossible. If you go to the places where developers hang out and try to promote your product, you will be shot down faster than Mark Zuckerberg at a privacy conference.

Dude. Reddit is practically more bot than person at this point, and its impossible to know by how much, because of how good they are at fooling everyone. https://www.clrn.org/how-much-of-reddit-is-bots/

The Dollar Shave Club, go pro

I specifically know who these guys are because of their massive youtube advertising campaigns.

Krispy Kreme, tesla

Please. Walk outside. Or watch cable for a bit. Just because you don’t personally see them doesn’t mean they don’t also have budgets for advertising as well. Tesla in particular straight up gave up on the strategy of word of mouth once their product stopped being known as quality, or at least, higher tech than anybody else.

https://teslanorth.com/2024/03/29/tesla-advertising-spend-6-5-million-2023/

https://ingenuitydisplay.com/what-is-krispy-kreme-s-advertising-budget.html

trader joes, costco

Exceptions to the rule, like Stardew valley, which prove the rule. They are famous as not having a marketing budget because not having a marketing budget is weird and unheard of.

I thought that was the joke; this is such terrible advice that it’s obviously a troll/sarcasm levels of joke.

You can’t really have a “reputation” in this day and age without marketing. The fact that things like Stardew valley exist really only prove the point.

Find a car that fits your needs and then pull the fuse powering the sim card before it leaves the lot. If it breaks, put the fuse back and don’t buy it.

My 2019 corolla lost the right speaker and mic access when I did that. I fixed the right speaker by crossing some wires, and the mic hasn’t really been needed enough for me to dig deeper to fix it.

Traditional way is to just use a WordPress account, and then move onto a paid hosting service of you decide you like keeping up with your blog. No point in paying for something you don’t use. Their ceo was a dick with open source stuff, but the website itself is still solid enough to be used to check if its a hobby you want to actually keep up with.

If you want to spend just as much time managing the blog as you do actually sharing things, a raspberry pi, Hugo, nginx, and a lot of time are also an option.

I personally use Porkbun for the .com and hostinger for the backend, and it’s been great for the past couple years to host my own wordpress setup.

But actually, I think that makes me oldschool. The new kids are using neocities.

Oh. I was joking. I’m aware that my storage capabilities really are an outlier, even though I still feel inadequate whenever I go to a hoarding community.

I’ve spent around 1200$ USD since I started collecting things back on 2021, which is about 300/year, or 25/month. I don’t expect to purchase anymore for another three years or so, right around when a 24tb drive drops to 150/each. It’s still not like, super cheap or anything though.

Nothing “almost” about it. Retail drives are available right now at 30tb. Although, the more reasonable price/GB is at around 8tb with occasional outliers.

Yeah. Normal people have about 100tb of total space. My 96tb (64tb usable) of space is completely average and not at all an indicator of something being wrong or abnormal.

Oof. Top three, but at the same time, half as much as the top paying site does.

Yeah, and on the smaller / earlier side of a theoretical search engine company, google offers their api for free. I think this is actually another one of the biggest contributors to why nobody has tried to make a new search engine with their own index. Why waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware, and even more on personnel costs, when you can just have google do it for you instead?

When I said ‘direct expenses’ I mostly meant the cost of owning / running a database of internet pages and metadata comprehensive enough to be considered part of a ‘fully featured search engine’. There’s also the other half; the compute required to create that metadata, as well as obtain it, but at most I would guess that those would be equal in cost to just having the space for a database of all the internet pages (scaling up after that based on how many users you need to support). In short, a scaled down web engine that had access to every page on the internet that people would want to find could cost as low as 100,000$ for a first time purchase for the hardware.

The internet archive does in fact have their own web crawler they use. They also do sites upon request as well; i’ve had my personal website on there for almost two decades now, specifically at my request.

They also have a full-featured search function available for anyone on their website at archive.org. This is why I say they’re a reasonable price comparison for a full-featured search engine. They may spend more on storage and less on metadata compute than a theoretical smaller search engine, but at the end of the day, that’s just a re-balancing of the cost, not a completely new and more excessive cost.

I think direct expenses; the cost of owning and maintaining an internet index database, are definitely significant enough that the completely free access that google gives to anyone who wants it, are way more than any single private entity or company is able to support just because they want to have it. I don’t think it would be anywhere even close to a billion dollars though.

I think the hardest part of having a internet index database would be the knowledge required to create and maintain it, especially under the hostile forces that are the 75 billion dollar seo industry. If a selfhosted search engine became big enough that the seo industry started trying to break it, I don’t think that company would survive for very long at all.

Google is losing that battle, like, almost completely. What hope would a small startup style company have of battling it and staying financially solvent, especially if they’re trying to be different from google and bing and actually showing results without the pressure of advertisers breathing down their necks?

I think the hardware side of a search engine is solvable with silicon valley startup level of funding. I think it’s impossible for anyone in the current day and age to make that sort of project solvent while keeping the user (instead of the advertiser) as the main customer. For anyone else who can’t get those funds, or don’t actually want to do a results-oriented search engine, they can just mooch of off google and bing for free.

Size isn’t everything, so the real question is: what search site uses only the common crawl index and has results on par with bing or google?

None of them. At least, none that I’m aware of. I just don’t think that direct expenses are the reason that there are are only two major web search tools. I also don’t think Google and bing are good examples to point at when estimating the cost of running a complete search engine.

If you read all of your article, the author notes that while Google has index of about 400 billion, the internet archives index is actually bigger at around 865 billion.

The internet archive has an operating cost of about 33m/year. I think that is a much more reasonable example to point to and say “running a complete search engine would have a similar price as that”.

Also, very neat article btw. I would have never guessed that googles search index count has been shrinking for the past little bit. Or that Google actively culls results from their database that it thinks people won’t ever want to see.

I think most startup search engines use Google/bing because it’s free/way cheaper than running their own database, not because it’s impossible. It also likely sidesteps a lot of the seo bullshit simply because Google/bing have more experience working around it

So like, short term/small size its cheaper and straight up easier to piggyback off of the big two companies, rather than manage your own data set. Long term, if you get popular enough to be noticed, I expect that the seo business would wreck any selfhosting search engine startup company’s results pretty regularly.

That’s like saying that it’s impossible to run a car manufacturing company without 100 billion because that’s how much Ford spends on their car manufacturing processes. It makes no sense.

Yes, making an original search engine is hard, just like making trucks is. But that doesn’t mean that running either one requires billions of dollars to do.

Common crawl is a nonprofit that regularly shares free copies of every internet page with metadata, and it damn well doesn’t take billions to do it either. https://commoncrawl.org/

The issue is that the internet is too large to index.

It’s really not. At least, not yet. It’s a large part of why it isn’t done, but it’s not the only one, and I’d argue, not even the main reason it isn’t really done.

A complete crawl with meta data of the internet in 2025 is only 424TiB. For comparison, my 1000$ home setup can handle about a tenth of that(in storage at least). The hardware to maintain a single database of the internet with metadata could cost under $100,000, easily.

Dave, your comment about it costing a billion to run Bing or Google might be true, but it is completely unrelated to the realities of running a small search engine and has everything to do with the fact that they are Google and Microsoft products respectively.

The real issue isn’t the physical size of the internet, it’s much more likely to be the complexity of making a search algorithm that can compete with the 75 billion seo market that wxists to break search engines.

As much as LTT deserves shit, and he really does, choosing to ignore a warning because its what the average user does, really shouldn’t be one of them. Users absolutely pull stupids like that, and his job was to see what a regular user would experience.

Steal the formatting from your meanwhileongrad link? That one works just fine. It’s just your history one that doesn’t display right.

Here, check it out from my point of view; https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/2659796/HistoryMemes-is-moving-to-Piefed-social