Well, for one thing, search is a tightly-coupled problem that revolves around a big and expensive data store. That's quite different from a browser.

Blekko did get volunteers to help edit our slashtags, and duckduckgo used to have volunteers help out with their duckduckhacks.

I think the main point is to not try to copy Google. DDG is power users' search engine for now, and that's OK. You may leverage power users help in tags, and other features, that would minimize the overhead in hardware platform. To make an extreme example - imagine how many data about the particular user would you need to have and how many resources would you need to spend on AI models training to give the same result by guessing and AI that user would get from SQLite, having formulated simple request in SQL.

Thanks the the advice! I guess you don't remember the search engine blekko. I was the CTO.

A web search engine requires a huge amount of computing resources to crawl the web, make sense of the connections, and to serve the resulting indexes.

You'll need some people too probably.

Yes, it's not so easy. But using Google web search only would not be particularly harmful, especially through the Tor.

I'm really confused here. Earlier you were asking why open source couldn't build web search, like it built Firefox (sort of); and now you're saying just use Google? Open source can build a page that just uses Google, but that doesn't get you off a dependence on Google.