Not a technical person, as I understand it, Google and Bing are full search engines while options like Seaexng, Ecosia, Duckduckgo are meta search engine that depend on Google or Bing. Are there other search engines that are fully independent, and if there aren’t, what are the barriers that stop other search engines from emerging
Yes there is.
The biggest barriers is data/context. The biggest being the primary index.
Google has a lot of web scrapers/indexers and also offers hosting platforms. They also partner with big hosting companies for index trees to be able to easily show web sites reliably AND have been around for years finding it.
This is actually one of the primary damages that AI is currently doing to the internet field, because not only is it decreasing web traffic for web hosts due to AI summaries and searches, but it’s also forcing web hosts to have to block or restrict indexers. Because these same agents are abusing the user agent system to try to pretend that it’s a normal indexer, so web hosts are faced with either having their platform spammed so many bot traffic that it takes their website down, or block indexers, which means that they don’t appear in web searches. It’s a lose lose.
fum@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Mojeek is an option I’ve not seen others mention:
www.mojeek.com/about/