Its only this way because companies have a vested interest in keeping it like that. It's how they make their money. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that people host their own search engine. 99% of people know how to install Google Chrome right? this should be no different. The entire search engine & webserver stack it depends on could be bundled into a .exe/.app installer with simple instructions people can understand. Consider XAMPP- which already provides a webserver stack that is extremely easy to install on Windows/Mac just by a simple .exe/.app that 'just works'. This hypothetical search engine could use similar methods as the XAMPP installer. There is no technical reason why this can't happen. It just isn't happening because it'd increase competition, cutting into DDG's profits.
Everyone has a PB of SSD disk space, some few TB of RAM and a few thousand CPUs to throw at the search problem, or is happy to type in a search query and give a 16 core CPU a few days to execute it, right?
That is just a naive implementation. For the first 10 results you grab ads, the database of those is significantly smaller, for the next 20 results you look at Wikipedia and stackexchange clone sites. Everything after that is indexed using math.random(). If you want to get fancy run the query through a fact creating AI and present the results inline, people are always happy to know that the color of the sky is purple or that the ideal amount of chess players is 5. Disclaimer: I have never seen googles source code nor any patents related to it, any similarity with existing search engines is pure coincidence.
> The best thing you could do, if you actually care about privacy and not just $$$, is to open-source the entire search index db and accompanying webserver software, making it easy for users to setup their own local instance of DDG which is truly auditable.
self hosting isn't feasible for 99% of the population. DDG is aiming to be the mainstream privacy protecting search engine, I used them for a while and can appreciate their efforts. if you want something nerdy and and self hosted use a searX instance or host it yourself.