So an open-source non-profit, ad-free search engine that's building its own index and tailoring it based on community feedback. And if I'm follwing correctly, this announcement is a paid membership program to support growing the index sustainably by offering paid program for additional URL submissions.

The notion of a "seed" appears to be a program for building out its index with a specified URL or handful or URLs as a starting point that are used to discover additional links. But also "uses external search results to find additional pages". So there's that.

I suppose I'm always game for additional independent search indexes. Independence is a good mission in and of itself, so here's another option outside of Kagi and DuckDuckgo if you're looking to DeGoogle. But beyond that I'm not sure what the motivation or mission is. Is it a better index, is it an anti-slop index? Is it a smol-web friendly or human content friendly index? Millionshort gets rid of "top" results, Kagi filters custom domains.

I suppose I don't disagree that the world could benefit from a thoughtfully curated and independent index and maybe the community input/feedback approach could be a new and novel secret sauce.