aaron: thanks for your post. So much new info and good observations.
>directories
They had their day and it is largely over. I see two scenarios left for directories that would be run as hobbies not for profit. 1. local geo specific search, especially in secondary tourist markets. Use the owner's local knowledge to blow away anything an algo might try to do. Boots on the ground promotion, fliers in local restaurants sort of thing. Don't be dependent on Google. 2. Indieweb and blog subjects. The Indieweb movement is not hostile to search engines but they aim to have discovery that does not depend on silos and gatekeepers. I don't think they really care about Google listings or rankings. It's about the fun and quality of words and thoughts and open source code that they care about. You won't make a dime with either hobby only, but I still believe helping people navigate the web is worthwhile.
>Curilie
This is news to me. I'm glad somebody is giving it a try if for no other reason than they would make a good starter crawl for new search engines. Things that provide legit web navigation independent of Google are good.
>new search engine
I was musing about this last night.
http://bradfordenslen.com/2018/05/22/provided-that-i.html If that reminds you of Duckduckgo, that's because it is what I suspect they are doing. It may only be a contingency plan like how Apple kept an Intel version of OSX secretly in dev for years just in case IBM abandoned chip making. If I were DDG, I would not be spending all the time and money building a search site and brand upon something as ephemeral as Bing. (DDG is really a meta-search: mostly Bing, some Yandex, some their own small crawl with Amazon, Wikipedia, Wikihow and others rolled in.) I'd have a plan B and C. And I just have a suspicion that starting their own index, is either DDG's secret endgame or in their contingency plans.
>Hotbot
I was making notes about Inktomi the other day and I could not remember the name Hotbot. It's kinda neat they are back. Nice clean SERP for now. They toned down the color scheme. hhh The privacy search niche is growing. Any word on who owns them?
>Gigablast
I thought it was long dead. I know the owner made the Gigablast script Open Source.