The catch is: this is 0.1 alpha software. I need a small team and some server capacity to get rolling. I need people to submit URLs. And a few hundred queries per second. That would scare the living shit out of big league search engines and might wake up some investor wanting to throw money at this.

In addition to users submitting articles, is there a reason this doesn't have a spider of its own based off something like the Google zeitgeist to seed some topics?

This project looks neat, I think first experiences with it would be much more improved if you could seed it with some content.

Maybe this could run my search with other search engines to compare and gain insights.

"is there a reason this doesn't have a spider"

Yes, server capacity. Once I have a better hosting situation I'll start crawling.

Thank you, I've tried to be neat this time around.

With regards to full-text search, the didyougogo search engine should be able to replace elasticsearch (which is laughable relevance-wise in my eyes) or solr, once the alpha-bugs are gone.

Why not let volunteers run the crawler on their own machines?

Perhaps HN members might offer some spare cpu cycles.

Makes sense re:crawling.

Maybe a few sites could be crawled and indicate some sample searches that could be run in the meantime.