A Good Start

The European Union is backing a public search index of web sites.

This is not s search engine.  Instead it is an index that can be used by search engines.

As such, it has an interest in being as extensive and accurate as possible, which in turn would mean that it will become more difficult for search engines, whether or not they use this index, to enshittify their product.

As search engines are intentionally made worse, and software grows ever bigger and more complex, a possibly unexpected ally emerges: the European Union.

If you ever get the impression that search engines are getting worse, or that alternatives are not all they seem, it's not just you. It's what journalist Cory Doctorow calls "enshitiffication." Many alternatives use Microsoft's Bing for search, so when Bing goes down so does DuckDuckGo, for instance.

But there are efforts to foster truly independent search engines that don't piggy-back on the existing giants. One such project is the EU-backed OpenWebSearch initiative. Its web presence reflects that this is a research effort; it doesn't have anything to sell you, so there's no elevator pitch here, although its FAQ page is a bit more helpful.

FOSS Force summarizes it as "Europe's Search for a More Localized and Relevant Search Experience." It's important to note what this isn't, though. It's not a new search engine. Rather, the project is building a web index, the idea being to make it easier for others to build search engines that can use the OpenWebSearch database as their index. The OpenWebSearch database is built using existing FOSS tooling, and it's not a static, monolithic snapshot – tools to keep the petabyte-scale index up to date are part of the effort.

Maintaining an up to date index of the web is difficult and expensive.

By creating one that any search engine can use, they have lowered the barriers to entry, and made competition between search engines easier. 

Read the article.  It also includes a number of techniques to remove Google AI spam from search results.