So for example duckduckgo is still trying to use various providers to emulate essentially "early google without the modern google privacy violations", but when I start to think about many of the most successful company-netizens, one thing that stands out is early day exclusivity has a major appeal.
So I imagine a search engine that is only crawling the most useful websites and blogs and works on a whitelist basis. Instead of trying to order search results to push bad results down, just don't include them at all or give them a chance to taint the results. It would have more overhead, and would take a certain amount of time to make sure it was catching non-major websites that are still full of good info ... but once that was done it would probably be one of the best search panes in existence. I have also thought to streamline this, and I know it's cliche, but surely there could be some ml analysis applied to figuring out which sites are SEO gaming or click-baiting regurgitators and weed them out.
Just something I've been mulling over for a while now.