While a lot of people are concerned with local model performance, I wonder how feasible is it now to run a local indexed web search? Surely running an old school Google is possible with the beefy AI rigs today. I know the problem will be crawling which would be bottlenecked by the ISP but I use Google to search SO, Wikipedia, programming language docs, Github issues, and AWS docs. I think a feasible workflow would be to build a set of sites of most interest to you and then prioritize those in crawling.

While typing this out I remembered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance which I never personally used but shows feasibility for the idea. I'm pretty sure one of the newly-announced Macbooks is more than up to the task of matching GSA's offering.

Impossible. The majority of websites firewall automated crawler traffic (because of the rise of the bots), only making exceptions for the largest search engines. There is no possibility of starting a new crawler.

Until 10 years ago, i used Dash for that. It’s still around https://kapeli.com/dash

It’s instant, works offline, auto-updates, and includes all the websites you listed, and allows for custom ones too.

Plausible. Figure 100 GB each of search index for Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and GitHub issues, then add a dozen more for docs of all your favorite techs. So maybe half a terabyte. Download and build updated dumps of those once every week or two, and it'd work pretty well. Impractical, but possible.

https://yacy.net/