I feel like there are probably some ad based search engines which are privacy and service oriented, but in general even for those there remains a misalignment problem. Hence if I don’t want to be a product now or in the future, what good search engines are there that I can pay for?
I think most startup search engines use Google/bing because it’s free/way cheaper than running their own database, not because it’s impossible. It also likely sidesteps a lot of the seo bullshit simply because Google/bing have more experience working around it
So like, short term/small size its cheaper and straight up easier to piggyback off of the big two companies, rather than manage your own data set. Long term, if you get popular enough to be noticed, I expect that the seo business would wreck any selfhosting search engine startup company’s results pretty regularly.