With the frustrations from using the usual search engines growing I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
It seems we’ve poisoned the well by allowing the proliferation of advertising interests to dominate the web.
Like how hard would it be to make your own non-commercial index?
Only human made sites that aren’t related to buying, selling, marketing, etc.
Could that be a federated open-source project?
spin up YaCY, see for yourself. It turns into a full time project, because there’s always ranking tweaks and and indexing startpoint changes to be made.
It’s relatively easy to put together a crawler for specific purposes, but a general web search is hard, and requires a lot of storage.
I might give it a whirl. Thanks!