[anthonyhn]

> search engine such an easy thing to produce?

Yes, I run my own independent search engine[0].

> successful

Now that's the challenging part, especially since Mozilla needs to fund browser development. The initial differentiation for a Mozilla search would have been difficult, but at their peak they had 30%+ market share, and if the default search on Firefox was Mozilla Search then they might have been able to make it all work financially. DuckDuckGo makes over $100 million in revenue per year[1], if a Mozilla Search made as much money annually, then even though it's below their current $500 million search contract with Google, with some fiscal responsibility they probably would have had enough to support a search engine and browser development concurrently.

[0] https://ichi.do/

[1] https://techreport.com/statistics/software-web/duckduckgo-st...