By selling ads solely against the query, and figuring out a way to track conversions against generated unique referring URL instead of using cookies. Maybe it's less profitable, but it might still be profitable, and it gives you a foothold.

Or a sponsored and unsponsored section. The only thing you pay for is for being higher up in the sponsored pane. No need for tracking. No conversion clicks tracked. Only higher on the sponsored listing.

Wouldn’t that prevent people with less money from buying their way up to the top? In other words, the ones with the most money (not startups, mom&pop shops, etc) would be the only ones at the top.

If one didn't mind breaking even rather than making money one could create a search engine which is free software and have groups/people host their own instances.

Searx (https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances) is exactly what you described.

I'd pay a subscription fee given that none of my digital fingerprints is being logged.

Marc from Cliqz here: it’s something I’m thinking about a lot since years, it’s a very clean model. We even did some tests, but unfortunately the majority of people is not like hacker news. What is a reasonable price point for you per month? How would you pay (ie would you feel comfortable giving us your credit card and create an account? (I don’t think crypto is big enough yet to solve this)