I’m happy to announce the first agressively alpha release of DontBeEvil.rip, a search engine built for programmers.

DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. If the service isn’t self-sustaining by March 1st 2023, it will be shut down. If it is, then it will be scaled up in these wonderful ways:

• Allow groups of subject matter experts to manage site crawl lists
• Expand scope of indexed resources to all STEM subjects
• Run our own crawler on the most active sites
• Add a Way Back Machine style cache

Status

HackerNews, StackOverflow, Arxiv abstracts, 2M Github repos, and Programmer Reddit (up to 2020) are being indexed.

The limited, but awesome, features in this first release are:

• Expressions! Experience the power of Elasticsearch’s Simple Query Strings
• REST API. For instructions, see the Using It heading below.

Caveats

I believe that, when you consume a service, if you aren’t paying then you’re being sold. I don’t want to ever be in a position to have to sell my user base. That’s why I’m requiring $10 monthly subscriptions, with a 15 day free trial, from March 1st.

DontBeEvil.rip is aggressively alpha at this point. I’ll do everything I can to ensure 100% uptime, but it will disappear from time to time.

Using It

The tl;dr is

apt install curl jq
pip3 install jtbl
curl -O https://github.com/alangibson/dontbeevil/src/rip && chmod u+x rip

./rip 'what is a monad'

If you want to hit the API directly, just take a look at the CLI script. It’s pretty self explanatory.

cat rip

Up Next

My next priorities are:

• Fresher Reddit posts
• More Github repos
• Index sites on the open web (starting March 2022)
• Pagination
• Simple web UI
• Start charging

I’d love to hear any suggestions, questions, comments or ideas you have. My contact info is on the left hand nav bar, so give me a shout.