Free and Open Source Software

We might be better off going back to web rings, word of mouth, and searching websites like Wikipedia and Imdb directly. I, for one, am sick of being funneled into the same bad results every time I search. The same old forum posts from 10 years ago with outdated information, many of which claim "your question was answered already!" followed by a dead link or a flame war.

No Federation, but Presearch is a Decentralized Search Engine that I've been using for ~6 months now. The results are about what I'd expect from your other major search engines. If you're into crypto they also send you a small portion of their token as a reward when you search, although I don't think they let you withdraw until you get a pretty large amount.

There's an addon for your browser you can download to have it be your default search engine too!

SearXNG is probably the closest equivalent, as it's decentralized, you can host your own, and you can grab search results from over 100 engines with it. Search engines don't really federate like the Fediverse does; they just query each other as proxies for you and return the search results.

This is the best I know of yet. It's a wrapper for google. You're definitely right that we need a decentralized one that understands the distributed governance structure of the fediverse

You're probably looking for YaCy, though it's more peer-to-peer and mostly predates the trend of federation.

Are you asking for something like Searx?