Yes offering everything for free to prevent competition has been a surprisingly effective strategy for Google.

I think you’d be right that the direct cost of running the crawler and index would not be the issue. But fighting SEO to keep your results decent is probably a cost that dwarfs the basic technical cost of running the crawler and index.

And you’d need a technical security team on top of things as link farms aren’t your only risk, I’m sure there are countless ways to manipulate the algorithm to put your site on top that Google probably have multiple teams working on fighting it full time.

Many of these things would likely not be a problem for a startup, though. No one is paying SEO firms big money to get into a search index no one has heard of and hardly anyone uses, so these costs probably grow exponentially over time as you become more well known.

I’m not disputing that you might be right, but the internet archive runs a very different service. Mainly that Google needs to continuously prune their 400 billion page index because of link rot. The Internet Archive has the opposite aim, they are preserving sites that no longer exist.

I’m also not sure they even crawl. Do sites get added on user request? When looking at a medium popularity page, you see it only has a couple of scrapes a year.

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.

I would suggest direct expenses are the barrier, but perhaps crawling is not the main expense. I would be interested to know any speculations you have outside of expenses that cause a barrier?

That website claims they add 3-5 billion pages a month. Google is doing that in a day or three, as recency of information is very important in search. Plus that site claims 100 billion pages to Googles 400 billion. It’s still an impressive project.

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?

I once read that running a search crawler costs upwards of a billion dollars a year. Anyone other than Microsoft or Google running their own search index are either not getting a wide spread of the internet or they are using their own index to supplement Google or Bing results.

Made up spellings are bad, but good luck searching for anything that isn’t a made up spelling or two words put together.

Yip you can do that but then it’s messy! And what if you overwrite a file by accident?

And if you do lose your hard drive then you have a weird state to restore from.

I’d much prefer the ability to restore to a point in time that comes with something like borg.

Remember sync isn’t a good backup. You’re thinking of loss of drives but if this is important data you need to also consider mistakes.

If you accidentally delete files you shouldn’t, you don’t want this deletion to sync to all your copies so it’s gone for good and the backup doesn’t help.

Personally I use borgmatic to keep incremental, deduplicated backups. Then I can go back to previous states.

If you install nextcloud all in one, it comes with a backup solution (also borg based). Then devices don’t need a copy of every file. But you’ll want your server to have a backup drive for this.

I then sync my borg backup to a backblaze b2 bucket for offsite, encrypted backup using rclone. That then meets the 3 2 1 backup plan.

I notice you mention Jellyfin. I don’t back up my Jellyfin media, the cloud storage for that could get very expensive and I could get it again if I needed it.

stay focused

😅

I can absolutely imagine sitting around with mates and deciding to order a delivered candy bar just to see if they would do it.

I think PieFed has only recently got an API for apps to connect to, hence the surge.

Kagi does seem to cut out a lot of blogspam. I think Google is incentivised to send people to these sites with adwords ads on them.

In New Zealand it’s pretty common to have a midwinter Christmas, even if you have never lived in the Northern Hemisphere. Not that everyone or almost everyone would do it, but in my experience most people would have at least heard of the concept (and I know people who do it most years, and others that do it occasionally).

This is in addition to, not instead of the normal summer Christmas.

I cook cut off a part of myself and sous vide it at my body temp and it would cook and be edible.

Can you really? Your internal body temp? Around 37C or under 100F? I can’t find any sous vide recipes that low. I can’t find anything under 50C, which would kill you if it was your internal body temperature.

The question reminds me of this:

Ross: Why are you mad at me?

Phoebe: You said I was boring

Ross: When did I say you were boring?!

Phoebe: Oh my God, I remember now! We were playing chess!

Ross: Phoebe! You and I have never played chess!

Phoebe: Oh, come on! Yes, remember that time on the frozen lake? We were playing chess, you said I was boring, and then you took off your energy mask and you were Cameron Diaz! Okay, there’s a chance this may have been a dream.

2 years for me as well!

I think it’s reasonable to respond with something like “I’m really not a kid person, I don’t much enjoy talking about kids or being around kids. I’m still happy to meet for coffee, but maybe we plan to keep it a short chat and see how it goes?”

They’re mostly just going to be the focus of the occasion because they need constant attention, and I don’t really like kids in general. And, if they cry or act up and attract attention I will hate that.

Many places will have toy areas for kids, maybe you can find one (or ask if they can suggest one since they are more likely to know which ones nearby have that). A 2 year old can probably keep themselves mostly entertained off and on for 30 mins or an hour, depending on the specific kid and if there are a good selection of toys. The 6 month old will need more attention but may well spend a lot of the time sleeping.

An old friend/aquaintance I’ve not spoken to in a few years popped up recently and we got chatting a little over text.

I don’t want to put you off, but I’d probably have a plan for what you’re going to do if they start a MLM pitch.

Ok thanks, I’ll have to be extra careful deploying any changes.

Thanks! I did see there’s a docker format and a podman format which I assume is what this difference is about. I’m not against discord but I’ve never really used it. I’ll check it out if I get desperate 🙂

Thanks, I had already played a bit with distrobox and hadn’t worked that out either. It seems adding a Z flag to my bind mount to keep SELinux happy is all that was needed.