I use searxng as a buffer between me and google.
Just use kagi. You can pay to support or just do a new account every 100 searches with a random mail-like username and password (they won’t send you any email, so just type something like [email protected]).
The brave search API/engine might have some interest for you. Not quite open source, but similar philosophy.
Indexing is something that could probably be outsourced to the community. Plenty of capable PCs just hang around waiting for a game or whatever (Local LLM inference, some Video editing etc.), and it’s not as if one would have to index everything. It should/could be configurable (Different interests, regions etc.).
actually do to all the shenanigans with the search engines from de-platforming to censorship, I would say what the world needs most is an open source, completely free speech search engine. I miss the search engines of the early 2000’s. If the best website was written by some kid in his parents basement, then that was what ranked #1, today, its a completely farcical and manipulated result driven by god knows what.
Stract is pretty good
Obligatory go support Stract search engine
I asked Stract for “world news” and it looks like nothing exists in informational space from the east/south of Europe and up to Tokyo, even so there real major wars and tensions exists. Looks like - either you eat news from “true” only source of information or nothing at all.
This is great. Thanks for sharing. I was thinking that there just wasn’t any open-source search + crawler.
Don’t you miss the golden days of the internet? I know I sure do. The internet from 20 years ago was like the wild west of information and I liked it.
Mojeek (https://www.mojeek.com/) maintain their own index as well, and appear to be quite proud of it. Still not as usable as Google, but they happily take feedback and are becoming a viable alternative.
I came here just to mention Yacy. I found it more than 10 years ago and tried it. It did retrieve some results but didn’t work great. It seems it improved a lot, taking into account the live demo from their site. Might try it again 
that’s a search aggregator, not a search engine
kagi is probably pretty cool, but it is not what OP asked for.
Discovered this recently and using it since a few days. Wonderful
SearX is no longer maintained. You should therefore currently use SearXNG.
However, both SearX and SearXNG are metasearch engines that use sources such as Google. This is therefore probably not necessarily what /u/konado_ has in mind.
Nobody is going to agree to allowing their computer to either crawl random websites or process the (potentially illegal) content.
Lmao isn’t this just the pied piper network?
To be fair, it’s not really search engines fault, or at least not only.
Over last 20 or so years SEO has become an industry of its own and is driving the enshittification of search results. Shitty sites with crap content want to make money from ads, so they pay for SEO to go to the top of search results.
SEO is also the reason why open source search engine would quickly loose quality. Google and Bing use proprietary alghorithms that do change from time to time but due to code being kept private SEO industry needs time for reverse engineering and testing to catch up and find new tricks. With open source alghorithm an engine would be constantly flooded with shitty results, unless some sort of fraud/SEO detection and discouragement was built into it.And even then alghorithm responsible for that would be open and thus easier to trick.
Unlike encryption or hashing alghorithms the open source nature of the project would bring little benefit and a lot of disadvantages.
All of my top results are usually ads and items for sale rather than the data I was looking for. I miss the old internet.
Just like everything that advertises “completely free speech”, it will be overrun by bigots and fascists.
Happened to voat, happening to Odysee and LBRY, happening to Twitter/X. Back in the early 2000s, this type of activity was mainly teenagers rebelling/being edgy and goofing around. Today it’s an actual threat to society.