Surely building your search engine required you to acquire new skills? Presumably your motivation to build a good search engine drove you to learn things you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Quite the opposite, I built the search engine as a means to learn something new, both in the skill acquisition sense but also just to learn more about the state of the Internet.

Like I'm very hands on with my learning. If I can't experience something myself and see it with my own eyes, even if that means building something from scratch, it just feels pointless.

I'm also probably a severe outlier in not being particularly motivated by goals in any aspect of my life.

Since formal education - I don't think I've learned anything without a goal in mind.

While I recognize we may have different experiences, aren't you ever curious about something?

Being curious about a thing - going away and learning about it - is having a goal in mind.

Surely that goal is learning itself? I'll argue that curiosity is the closest thing there is to a hunger pang for learning.