[marginalia_nu]

Oh, that's sad :-(

For what it's worth, my search engine got prematurely "announced" for me on HN as well, while likewise hilariously janky. I don't think the launch is the end of the world. (I guess I had the benefit of serving comically bizarre results when the queries failed, so it got some love for that)

The bigger struggle is, because a search box is so ambiguous, people tend to have very high expectations for what it can do. Many people just assume it's exactly like Google. It's something a lot of indie search engine developers struggle with. Even if your tool is (or potentially could be) very useful, how can you make people understand how to use it when it looks like something else? Design wise it's a real tough nut to crack, a capital H Hard UX problem.