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You can do your own search-index with 2.3 billion pages for about €300/month:

I think your project is great for how it does so much with so few resources, but most big search engines have an index which is more than 1,000X as large as yours (per document), in order to improve results.

>Building your own big search index ... //

The guy who started DDG [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu] shared a lot of his solo search engine creation here. At one point at least he was running his own crawlers/index (but not IIRC exclusively). It might be instructive to search over past posts and find the details.

I don't think he was using anything like $1 million as, again IIRC, it was self funded. But this was a few years (10?) ago now.

Moz, ahrefs , majestic.. They all have built their own search index. It's not trivial but it's not Google-hard either.

All of these provide lists of backlinks. That's a bit different from providing high-quality search results. Also, I don't think that any of them have a budget as small as $1 million.