I've been sort of thinking there really ought to be a sort of open source manhattan project to disrupt the search ecosystem and offer real competition to big tech.
There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint.
My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on.
As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.
