Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server
As on Orthodox Jew, while I don't have anything against this and it sounds like a fun hobby project, I don'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't Jews (Jewish law only expects Jews to keep the sabbath). If it's Jews working to generate the electricity (most "modern" or "yeshivish" Orthodox Jews don't believe this is a problem; I don't know what fraction of "ultra-" Orthodox Jews disagree with that), any public cloud outside of Israel should suffice. If you're concerned with electricity, why not worry that Jews may be working to maintain the server'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't Jewish)?<p>If you'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't require using batteries or really anything special about the site's hardware or even software.<p>Finally, why call it a 'kosher' 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/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'd be benefitting indirectly from the work of the Jews that maintained the infrastructure - however, I think it'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're concerned about this, the final answer would probably still be that indexing during the sabbath is fine.