> "A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can't do it for free. It's going to have to be ad-supported."
Not necessarily. Firstly, you might not want to search the whole internet anyway, given how much clickbait spam, link farms, blackhat SEO, and whatnot there is now, thanks to the damage the advertising-driven search model has done to the internet. And secondly, there are alternative search funding models, e.g. subscription fee or listing fee. FWIW, that's the premise behind my side project - search just the good stuff, with no direct adverts, and result pages which contain adverts clearly flagged and heavily downranked.