20 years ago, all the engines (AltaVista, Lycos) did exactly that. And then they all became "portal" like. And then a brand new engine with just a search box (so refreshing so clean) came along and swiped them over....
Duckduckgo seems like the obvious alternative search engine these days, but how much of their own indexing do they do? It seems from some casual googling (no, the irony of that is not lost on me) that they mostly rely on Bing or Yahoo as the backend.
Some thoughts:
Search engines should be a lot easier to build in 2017 than they were two decades ago when Google started out. We don't have to store the index in DRAM to avoid hard drive seek times like they did; we can use SSDs.
Having a good quality ranking metric could offset shortcomings in the size of the index. PageRank is okay, but we could do better by punishing sites that link to low-quality content.
Speaking of PageRank, the PageRank patent expires in a couple years, I believe. So, constructing ranking algorithms that build on PageRank will soon be an option.
It's hard to compete with Google and Bing in terms of hardware resources, but probably the minimum investment to build a useful search engine is probably at lot lower than what we might think.
A lot of the basic software infrastructure is probably already written. I don't know what the state-of-the-art in web crawlers is, but in 2017 I doubt that one would have to write one from scratch.
Maybe there's a way to build a shared/federated distributed index.
Running the project as a non-profit might be the best way to maintain trust of users. Not having any ads at all (like Wikipedia) might be a good way to one-up Google's previous policy of no ads/news on the front page.
Also, don't google have loads more ranking algorithms than just pagerank?
Also: I like that they're experimenting, but come on. Replacing a settings menu with a list of very specific yes/no questions that are added to that list as you encounter them - that's just wrong. You don't even get a benefit of being able to scroll through a settings screen to discover what features are available...
An early RSS-based aggregator -- but you could (and can) choose your feeds, if you like.
I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google.
I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.
Trade offs.
I think there’s a middle ground though - and Google is far far on one side of it.
Searching for something like "programatically create credit memo magento" yielded the user documentation on how to create a credit memo while Googles first result was the relevant API page with the second being forum posts explaining how to do what I wanted.
If you need specific results and don't get them, you go back to Google.
DDG is my default, and I'm quite happy with it.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana