Maybe something like brave's model where you charge up a crypto currency and can pay for micro transactions to search.
Not OP, but JS crypto mining comes to mind.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
excited to see the new search engine you build then!
Plenty of otherwise-viable business models can't compete with free-but-spying. Hell, open protocols with free implementations aren't having much success. Just not enough incentive to use them, which lowers incentive to work on them, causing a feedback loop that keeps them from improving much.