More competition in the space would be great for me as a consumer, but the problem is that the high fixed costs make starting an index difficult.

I've been wondering can't this be done p2p? Didn't we solve most of the technical problems in the late 90s / early 2000s? And then just abandoned that entire way of thinking for some reason?

If many thousands of people care about having a free / private / distributed search engine, wouldn't it make sense for them to donate 1% of their CPU/storage/network to an indexer / db that they they then all benefit from?