@Ben Pate ? Ideally, a Fediverse search engine would be decentralised and federated itself, and ideally, the code would be maintained by "the community" rather than one individual. But I guess that'd be hard to achieve.

Even then, such a search engine probably wouldn't be able to index the entire Fediverse right away and all the time. If you want tiny new instances of even the most obscure Fediverse project to be crawled right after they've come alive on someone's Raspberry Pi for the first time, you'd have to include support for such a search engine in the projects themselves. Instead of users or instances, the projects would have to opt in.