It would be interesting to see a decentralised, residential collective that builds and publishes an index. There are surely enough interested people on HN alone that would be willing to run software at home to scrape a small slice of the internet.

Something like YaCy?

Just like that! I will give it a try

residential proxies are one of the leading causes of what's killing the internet right now

The majority of websites try to do that but they do not catch as much traffic as they think they do. A starting point for a scraper is to run it on your home connection in an undetectable web driver framework such as zendriver.

This was a knee jerk response to the first paragraph. They weren't talking about a general crawler, but a subset of Wikipedia, stack overflow, programming docs and github. You can download archives of all of those except github, and github could be queried using the api or GH cli

Most of the stuff should be bypassable with browser automation but you'd need more compute to run a full browser versus a basic uri fetch.

I imagine it'd take quite a bit of shape for the index and be hard to keep it up to date unless you restrict what it indexes.