How hard would it be to make a new search engine? One that isn’t operated by a big tech company.
Well first you would have to build all the software and pay for all the hardware
Then you would need to build up your index
That is where a problem appears, due to AI scrapers many websites now don’t allow any bots other than google bot and maybe bing bot so you would need to convince publishers to allow you on their sites
Actually doing it would cost crazy amounts of money before you even consider the convincing the sites to let you in thing
That’s tens of billions of dollars
There has never been a startup that got that much in a single funding round much less a non corporate non government organisation that held that much money that isn’t the Catholic church.
I simply cannot imagine a successful open source search engine people want to use
Even duckduckgo often borrows results from Bing
Search engines clearly aren’t going away, people aren’t going to deal with link lists and they want to be able to search the whole web at once
What do you think?