Interested in a far-out-there project, that is still very early, lacking in manpower and money, may never pan out, but has some very interesting ideas and vision?

Check out mwmbl - a project aiming to become a truly FOSS search engine, with Wikipedia-like volunteer curating of results/training of the search algorithm, as well as volunteer scraping of the web, to build it up.

If you want to participate, their non-experimental, older and more barebones interface is easier for that:

https://mwmbl.org/

I currently use it as my go-to “first search” engine, and if I can, I help curate the search results, and then switch to Ecosia for a second search if they were useless. That already helps in slowly training the algorithm, as well as changes the results in the index real time.

You can also support the web crawling and index building efforts with either a Firefox extension, or a CLI script.. Not to brag or anything, but letting the latter run on my server has netted them a pretty hefty increase in crawled addresses, without slowing things down here on my Fediverse servers too much.

THIS IS NOT A SUITABLE DROP-IN REPLACEMENT FOR ANYTHING YET. But if you love the idea, go ahead and check it out.

Manifesto here.