Posted by UnmappedStack 12/29/2025
Sadly, it currently does not have its own index but rather uses the Brave search API. Once I'm in a financial position that it's possible, I would absolutely love to build a completely new index from the ground up which is open source, as well as an open source ranking and search algorithm, to back it.
I posted on Reddit and got an amazing amount of feedback which I implemented a number of feature requests, so I would really like your ideas, critiques, and bug reports as well. Thank you and sorry for the long post!
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There was this project on hackernews which was recently shown where they (scraped?) the internet and then created an really efficient embedding of the search engine. I wish if you could look more into it or contact the creator of that project perhaps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878151 (Show HN: Building a web search engine from scratch with 3B neural embeddings)
Looks like https://search.wilsonl.in/ they have since then closed the live demo but I had used it when it was live and in my opinion, it was a mix of that if things needed some improvements but that it was also usable for some things which were in the dataset (Of course you wouldn't get Organic chemistry questions/answers for high schoolers as an example in there but you will find most things (usually wikipedia) and then some good sources, usually the ones popular but it was really cool overall so perhaps you can look more into it and helps
Now I really love your project a lot and I think there should be not for profit search engines, but I am a little worried about using it since if I use it as my search engine, then it might cost you a lot of money (using the brave api) .
I just searched and it seems that ecosia is a non profit as well so you can definitely partner up with them, I remember a post about qwant and ecosia partnering up to create an independent search engine.
I think that there should be competition within the search engine space especially via non profits in a way similar to wikipedia one might say ideally. Wishing you the best for this project's future!
Kagi (custom) bangs[1] already supports `!cobalt <youtube video>`
I just added !cobalt to my custom bangs as `https://cobalt.meowing.de#%s`, and it works.
Kagi also accepts new public bangs: https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs#contribution-guidelines
Kagi bangs are free for everyone (a subscription is required for custom bangs and regular search).
- Example of how to use Kagi bangs without subscription: https://kagi.com/search?q=!chatgpt+TEST
- https://zbang.leftium.com/ uses Kagi bangs under the hood.
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#custom-bangs
I think kagi's nice but this is some real pain which I feel like could be solved via nilch with not much pain as well.
Perhaps you can add the cobalt bang to kagi's global list so that people like us who don't use Kagi can use it as well too since the bangs are free for everyone.
Eventually, zBang will execute bangs locally before falling back to a Kagi network call. It's open source: https://github.com/Leftium/zbang
I just remembered my other project can support cobalt. Just enter the youtube URL and press ENTER (or click the buttons): https://mm.leftium.com?p=C4S2BsFMAIF5oEQGED2AjAhuY0AikBbFBAK...
- The link above embeds the cobalt "launch plan" (config) in the URL, but it could also be added as one of the built-in plans like https://mm.leftium.com/svelte.
- Also open source (and very simple to deploy): https://github.com/Leftium/multi-launch
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But what's the difference between these two?:
1. Go to https://nilch.org and search for `!cobalt YOUTUBE URL`
2. Go to https://cobalt.meowing.de and search for the YOUTUBE URL
I think #2 is actually simpler for that person you are trying to help.
I'll have a look into that project, thank you. Cost is a slight issue so far, yes. There have been about 4,000 searches in the past couple days but I've slightly improved cost efficiency with caching, and I've received two small donations which do help a bit, so the hope is that donations will be able to sustain it.
Partnering with Ecosia is a really interesting idea, however I think that there may be a conflict of interest since they do aim to make money with ads, just to go towards environmental efforts rather than a corporation. They would be disadvantaged if nilch was at an advantage over their users.
I do love the wikipedia model and I hope that nilch can run similarly. Thank you again!
Clicked to give it a try, only to be greeted with this LLM authorship trope.
If "sick of AI", rehumanize the slogan?
And carry on! "We were there" when DDG and Kagi got started; hope you enjoy carving a niche as well.
// Yes, LLMs learned it from SEO and marketing slop predating LLMs, but the "No A, No B, Just C" association is too dominant for your brand.