How does one know it's metasearch engines. Which ones are they. Have there been any discussions with them.
If a web search engine is truly noncommercial and one wants as may folks to to use it as possible, is it feasible to let others copy the crawler, the index and front end. It's like a fisherman who gives way his catch. As word spreads, he will be overwhelmed. Unless he teaches others how to do what he does, how to fish.
The problem with Google and all the Google wannabes is that they want all traffic to pass through their servers, for commercial reasons. In the beginning Google claimed their search engine would be in the academic realm. Presumably others could copy it. This turned out to be a lie. Now people cannot not seem to separate the idea of web search engine from potential money printing machine. The fisherman does not want to help anyone else to learn how to fish.
We need a noncommercial web search engine that can be replicated. It does not have to be a Google clone. A great way to stop anyone from working on web search engines is to suggest any new search engine must be as good as or better than Google, i.e., it must be huge, it must be commercial, and it must be a black box. On the contrary, a new noncommercial search engine can have humble beginnings and does not have to be anywhere near Google quality. IMO, there should be noncommercial web search engines with low traffic. They could all be instances of the same crawler, same index and same front end, they could be variations, they could be totally different. But IMO there should not be one set of servers controlled by one entity hoarding 90% of noncommercial search traffic.