The problem is that the web as we know it (useful, human-curated information that's put out there to help people) is also over. It's been totally overrun with AI slop. Even before AI could be used to create propaganda on a scale that we could only dream about 5 years ago, it's been declining under the weight of SEO sweatshops for a good 10 years. Meanwhile the actually decent content, the individual hobbyists who are just sharing their knowledge, have largely left under the weight of comment spam and DDoS attacks and doxxing.

So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.