Decentralizing search itself seems impossible. We're likely stuck with private search providers.
The thing that centralized Google as our legacy web search provider was simply that they produced better search results than all the others by a wide margin.
Like all other decentralized systems, the only way I see to stop that happening to private search providers in Nostr is for them to share a search distribution protocol.
Do you think it would be possible for Nostr devs to work together and build a single search protocol for all their apps that includes results from all present and future private search providers?
Or will the problem always remain that a new private search provider could pop up that is so good they'll steal eyes away from the in-app search results?