I searched for "horror movies" and the first result was a lemmy community that has literally "616 subscribers" "30 Posts" and "76 Comments" which is about as dead as you would expect from a lemmy instance.
I also searched for "league of legends", and it couldn't find its homepage.
I think its ranking algorithm may need improvement.
Edit: also, I'd rather not say this, but do we really need another DuckDuckGo? I don't think Google fails at its job because of financial incentives. I think it might fail at this job simply put because the web of 2024 isn't the web of 1990. For example, the lemmy result, it's a link aggregation about horror movie articles. The search engine could literally do the job of the link aggregator, as it has a SERP that aggregates links, and yet it's aggregating links to link aggregators. Why are the search engines doing this? Because it's 2024. I wish someone tried a new approach at this problem rather than just copying Google's design and saying "it's Google but not yucky".
The reason I'd rather not say it is exactly because I don't want to sound like I'm just coming in here and shitting on things.
I think there are no open source search engines because the instant you realize you have to periodically scrape the trillions of web pages in your index for updates you just give up because there is no way you can afford that without a solid business plan, which is hard to have when you are a search engine with no users, because you have no results, because you can't scrape trillions of webpages to build an index. Hence, I don't think it makes sense to try to make a general-purpose search engine, specially as Google has mastered that art and Google results look like that.
I also searched for "league of legends", and it couldn't find its homepage.
I think its ranking algorithm may need improvement.
Edit: also, I'd rather not say this, but do we really need another DuckDuckGo? I don't think Google fails at its job because of financial incentives. I think it might fail at this job simply put because the web of 2024 isn't the web of 1990. For example, the lemmy result, it's a link aggregation about horror movie articles. The search engine could literally do the job of the link aggregator, as it has a SERP that aggregates links, and yet it's aggregating links to link aggregators. Why are the search engines doing this? Because it's 2024. I wish someone tried a new approach at this problem rather than just copying Google's design and saying "it's Google but not yucky".