> In that spirit, I offer the following alternative challenge: Create a web search engine.

Yea, no thanks.

If I'm going to work on something in my spare time, I am going to work on something that I am interested in and find fun. I generally loathe the dirty work often involved in software engineering and debugging all of these dependencies all the time. It's exhausting. Doing things from scratch puts me in charge.

And I mean, creating a search engine is the ultimate "not invented here" project. I'd just pay for and use Google, Bing, or whatever else API to do things for me. So it doesn't even make sense in the context of your objections.