Setting aside for a moment the fact that virtually no one online has noticed that essentially every web search engine is now a search engine illusion (a facade - a 'Potemkin village'), we have a second issue at hand:
When these search engine illusions become the topic of discussion, virtually no one has any clue how powerful the search engines were before the illusions arrived, or how they were used.
This shouldn't be possible absent the killing-off of just about everybody who was using the Internet between 1998 and 2020.
I have no explanation for it.
There's some kind of Internet (maybe even reality) manipulation taking place that shouldn't be possible.
This isn't the problem.
Big investment would only be required if you were trying to be 2007 Google at launch.
For a basic web search engine that simply indexes all pages crawled, runs the user query against the index and returns the URL and snippet for each matching page (in blocks of 10), there are many models that would require little funding to get it started. Once started, the rate at which its speed and crawling frequency increases will be directly proportional to the rate at which ad (or subscription) money comes in.
Someone is actively shutting down uncensored web search engines that do their own crawling, probably before they even launch. And all these tech billionaires somehow know they're not allowed to launch one.