I am amazed that there is no open source, distributed search engine to rival Google. We let Google get too much data about us. Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that.
"Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that."
A strong part of Google's search engine results is leveraging the data it has from Google Maps (including the almost unique Google Street View), actions tracked through the user’s Google account, and proprietary image-recognition technologies. It’s hard for another party to compete with that; Google hasn't been a mere web crawler in a long, long time.