I was recently thinking about an open search protocol with some federation elements in two parts. A frontend and an indexer. The idea is that anyone can run his

I was recently thinking about an open search protocol with some federation elements in two parts. A frontend and an indexer. The idea is that anyone can run his own search frontend or use a community hosted one (like Matrix). And then each frontend has X amount of indexers configured. Each indexer is responsible for a small part of the web and by adding indexers you can increase your personal search area. And there is some web of trust going on. Entities like stackoverflow and Wikipedia and reddit could host their own domain specific indexers. Others could be crowdsourced with browser extensions or custom crawlers and maybe some people want to have their own indexer that they curate and want to share with the world. It will never cover the utility and breadth of Google Search but with enough adoption this could be a nice first search engine. With DDG inspired bang commands in the frontend you could easily retry a search on Google. With another set of colon commands you can limit a search to one specific indexer. The big part I am unsure about in this setup is how a frontend would choose which indexers to use for a specific query. Obviously sending each query to each indexer will not scale very well.