I’m not sure if this is really feasible (even though I’d be happy to see a working libre search engine). The problem I see is that a search engine is incredibly expensive to run, which makes it hard to maintain servers on a donation model.

Yet it would be interesting to hear, why this shocks you so much. :)

Is it because you don’t think search engines are a service worth paying for or because Google, Bing, DDG … are free?

The problem with all those search providers is: Someone still has to pay for infrastructure. You can either donate/pay for the service or accept ads and tracking.

(I know that YaCy works a bit differently, but honestly even though I really like the idea of the system: This “novel” search engine is almost 20 years old now and never really worked very good.)