This is exciting. Recently I started to work on an answer engine/search engine. It still sucks but it's a good project to work on when bored

http://kairos.xyz/

In a few weeks I'll publish the source code and do a Show HN.

I wish a lot of luck to

https://www.mojeek.com/

and

http://www.lexxe.com/

too. DuckDuckGo also started to crawl the web with its own bot (right now they're using Yandex's api).

We need more competition from different countries. Just think about the censorship done by Baidu or how Google never plays by its own rules.

It's also interesting to think about a way to monetize a search engine. For kairos.xyz I was thinking about paid accounts (1 euro per month) providing more features, like the ability to search from the command line. For example you write "kairos Richard Stallman" and it prints basic information about Richard Stallman on your terminal.