I’m interested in “alternative search” but also very conflicted. I’d like to see an index belong to the “commons”, but as the article points out, running crawlers is costly - at both ends. You’ll also spend a lot of money on crawling content farms that you then need to weed out again. Lots of adversaries in the attention economy. This is not even about “search” yet, just the index. I’m sceptical when it comes to EU top-down initiatives.
The ex-Burda-cliqz-now-Brave-Search people had a chutzpah approach: let the users browser do the crawling. Of course it failed because who would send off their browser contents and history even if you promise anonymization? But it was smart from an effort/energy perspective. Also: less expensive to run service can translate to user agency, less need to monetize. They left their knowledge tombstone at 0x65.dev.