I love the notion. The marketing “better than DDG” is a little janky. Perhaps consider a positive statement, like “finally find what you’re looking for”.

This is a crowded landscape. I’ve been here since Gopher and seen plenty of services come and go. With that in mind, here are some questions you might want to consider:

How does it compare with products like SearXNG, specifically their ecosystem of plug-in search types?

How do you plan to pay for it?

How do you expect to protect the index against spam?

How will you scale it to a global audience?

How will you handle language?

Good luck!

To answer your questions in order:

• We have our own index, its not a shitshow of mixed results like Searx tends to be. this also means that we’re not chasing breaking changes of some larger engine when they decide they dont want us, like Twitter did to Nitter, and Bing did to Searx.
• We don’t know how to monetize. Ads are the only option that we know of, donations do not work at all, as proven by my previous projects.
• We’ve already got spam prevention and removal measures in place, but I won’t discuss them.
• We don’t know how to scale it since its centralized by design and the frontend and backend are tightly integrated, largely because the frontend is largely generated on the fly by the backend. Maybe host a copy for each region we’re aiming to acquire users from?
• Our engine already understands 5 languages, and we hope to expand to CJK languages soon.

We don’t know how to monetize. Ads are the only option that we know of, donations do not work at all, as proven by my previous projects.

A subscription-based model might be the only viable one, since ads will inevitably lead to a conflict of interest. The problem is that people are so used to the notion that everything is “free” that many are convinced that online services should always be free.

Personally I pay for Kagi which has been decent enough

Personally I pay for Kagi which has been decent enough

Whats “decent enough” mean?

I pay for it, the results are quality and the fact that my brain doesnt have to sift through ad results and can just look at the real data is so nice. Additionally, they have a large number of “lenses” which can change the scope of your search. For example, they have a lens for searching lemmy as well as lenses for the “small web”, which filters out all the results from massive corporate websites and gives way more personal project sites and the like.

All in all I’m a fan.