What are you doing to improve the quality of these results? I often find myself hitting !g because Google just understands what I want better. And that's not with these constantly hyped "local" or "contextual" searches, no, it's the searches for errors, programming problems or memes (which, of course, can be vague). I would gladly submit you some of the requests I use !g for if you had a low-friction UI for it. Maybe you could use some more data on this stuff.

You're also in a unique position to compete with Google by offering advanced search tools. You have the data! Yet I can only search images by "past day", "past week", "past month". Off to Google I go again.

In the same vein, what are you doing to combat SEO spam? Again, you're in the unique position to do something for the public good and your profits here. Your search engine also suffers from the many low quality results of "buy buy buy" (the thing I want information on, not buy, god damn it) and github/SO rehashing sites, ad-laden blog spam and the like.

But imagine if it didn't! Imagine the web being searchable again!

Currently I somewhat follow projects like search.marginalia.nu and mwmbwl (or something), but those don't even have 0.1% of your funding.

I just want to be able to find content made by humans again ...