Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server
As on Orthodox Jew, while I don&#x27;t have anything against this and it sounds like a fun hobby project, I don&#x27;t like that it misleads regarding what Jewish law actually requires.<p>As several others have mentioned, there is absolutely no problem with keeping a server running on the sabbath - computers aren&#x27;t Jews (Jewish law only expects Jews to keep the sabbath). If it&#x27;s Jews working to generate the electricity (most &quot;modern&quot; or &quot;yeshivish&quot; Orthodox Jews don&#x27;t believe this is a problem; I don&#x27;t know what fraction of &quot;ultra-&quot; Orthodox Jews disagree with that), any public cloud outside of Israel should suffice. If you&#x27;re concerned with electricity, why not worry that Jews may be working to maintain the server&#x27;s internet connection (again, this is trivially solved by not hosting it in Israel - all it takes is a non-Jewish majority to provide a reasonable presumption that the workers probably aren&#x27;t Jewish)?<p>If you&#x27;re worried about Jewish users accessing it on the sabbath (in my opinion the least far-fetched concern, but not one addressed by the site), the complete solution would be to shut it down for ~49 hours every week starting from ~sunset on Friday in east Asia - this doesn&#x27;t require using batteries or really anything special about the site&#x27;s hardware or even software.<p>Finally, why call it a &#x27;kosher&#x27; search engine when almost anyone interested in such a thing would understand that as being about filtering the search results?<p>Edit: <i>If</i> you assume that using electricity and&#x2F;or internet that are maintained by Jews on the sabbath is a problem, I guess you might be able to make a case for avoiding indexing sites in Israel or at all during the sabbath, since then you&#x27;d be benefitting indirectly from the work of the Jews that maintained the infrastructure - however, I think it&#x27;s safe to assume that the vast majority of the internet is not served using infrastructure actively supported by Jews during the sabbath so even assuming you&#x27;re concerned about this, the final answer would probably still be that indexing during the sabbath is fine.