You're right that it doesn't make sense to have everyone run their own crawler. But if there were a standardized index transfer format (that is, a standard ind

You're right that it doesn't make sense to have everyone run their own crawler. But if there were a standardized index transfer format (that is, a standard index type and a wire encoding) then that would open up more options. One could imagine an RSS-style feed where a site could post an index of its content. Or, if you think that's open to spamming, then multiple crawlers could publish indexes for types of content and users could subscribe. Hell, even something like UUCP or a Usenet style of "store and forward" could be used to propagate indexes across the network. Still, the size of the index is a problem: I'm sure storage of the index would take many terabytes to make local search reasonable.