It costs money, which is how they can be an actual search engine rather than an ad portal that pretends to be a search engine. I have seen the future. Crap is

It costs money, which is how they can be an actual search engine rather than an ad portal that pretends to be a search engine. I have seen the future. Crap is free. Endless amounts of crap. Soon all this crap will be AI generated and designed to addict you. If you want anything that is not crap you will have to pay for it. I'm a huge fan of self-hosted and decentralized stuff but a search engine is an area where I can't think of a way to do such a thing. The bandwidth requirements for continuous spidering and the data storage requirements are too high, and if you tried to distribute it you'd end up with an absurdly chatty protocol that couldn't be used by anyone with anything short of an unmetered full duplex fiber link. The next best thing is a company that I pay to be a search engine for me and does that without trying to shove ads at me.