Isn’t it possible to “find” the most valuable website in the web with the help of a well mixed community? I am thinking if an small browser add-on which can share the basic url of a visited websites with a website scrapper. The scrapper can then index the whole website with its sub pages. The add-on could be installed independently by users which would like to strengthen the network.
Besides setting up an own search index, one could try to export search results from #Google and Bing as a ramp up help, which are similar to #startpage and #duckduckgo. I mean I am no search engine expert, but is there so much more magic?
I did a little SEO work when I was starting in the industry (not my proudest). Google really was playing a cat and mouse game with the SEO folks. Like take the approach of counting inbound links to a give page from pages with lots of text. So the approach there is to submit “articles” to a bunch of sites and have a link to a client’s site in the author’s bio. Any search engine that gained significant popularity would have to retrod Google’s anti-spam steps over the course of the past 20+ years, likely on a shoestring budget because they would be competing against Google ad revenue that isn’t constrained by the same stringent privacy concerns.