It claims I reached the article limit. The last time I saw a fastcompany link must have been a decade ago! I was nostalgically looking forward to read another article of theirs. Alas...

https://archive.is/HA7y4

Some bits and pieces:

> his new search engine, the robust Search-a-Page <https://searcha.page>, which has a privacy-focused variant called Seek Ninja <https://seek.ninja>

> The secret to making it all happen? Large language models. “What I’m doing is actually very traditional search,” Pearce says. “It’s what Google did probably 20 years ago, except the only tweak is that I do use AI to do keyword expansion and assist with the context understanding

> Fellow ambitious hobbyist Wilson Lin, who on his personal blog <https://blog.wilsonl.in/search-engine/> recently described his efforts to create a search engine of his own, took the opposite approach from Pearce.

> And then there’s the concept of doing a small-site search, along the lines of the noncommercial search engine Marginalia <https://marginalia-search.com>, which favors small sites over Big Tech

And the obvious answer to the title: "Why the laundry room? Two reasons: Heat and noise." It runs on a a 32-core AMD EPYC 7532, half a terabyte of RAM, and "all in, cost $5,000, with about $3,000 of that going toward storage"

I absolutely devoured Wilson Lins articles recently .. they are very high quality and informative for any amateur interested in search engines and LLMs! - https://blog.wilsonl.in/search-engine/

Reader mode in Firefox (plus sometimes a page refresh) gets me past most paywalls -- including this article.