Given that:

- Google has been around for 20+ years, so the concept of search engine and the technologies behind it should have been well known.

- Computing power and Internet speed has increased significantly and in many homes (at least outside of US) 1Gbps is norm.

- Everyone is talking about Google deteriorating over the years and prefer the old Google. The old system from the 2000s should be dirt cheap to run with modern home hardware.

- People's need for search engine is highly specific, you presumably would be interested in searching a small subset of the whole Internet.

My question is: why haven't a local run search engine be a thing at least in the tech circles?

It should be able to bootstrap with e.g. an hourly updated "top 100 websites in 50 categories" index file, and adapt to my daily queries to automatically update the index in the background, and iteratively improves the quality of the results.

The rise of the local LLM users proves this model works.