Possibly a completely dumb idea, but I’ve wondered for a while if there would be value in building an open data web index, something which would allow competing providers to offer different search algorithms on top of.

I don’t know enough about the technical details about building a search engine, so perhaps this isn’t feasible because the algorithm and the index need to be tightly coupled to each other, but my hunch is that it would be beneficial for the web if there were an open street map of search indexes.