I salute your efforts and endorse your search engine. I also recognize that you know what it takes to build a search engine.
I don't think you have deep familiarity with EU academia.
- The primary goal for academia is to influence society. Publishing is a route to that.
- Being head of the EU search engine project would give high academic status
- There are hundreds of articles which you could publish on this project
- Rock solid CS. Would someone like Knuth count as "rock-solid"? Who is better at CS, the person who can implement quicksort because they practiced leetcode, or the person who invented quicksort?
- information retrieval basics. Again, these basics were probably developed in academia.
The skills you say are basic to this endevour are more prevalent in top-quality professors and post-docs than they are in industry.
On top of these skills, you actually need most of all software engineering and architecture experience. I don't think this is common in academia at all. Not in professors, not in PhD-students. You need practical experience building complex software at a large scale. Across that, you need to implement these CS fundamentals.
This is requires far more CS than you'll find in your usual software development effort, for sure, and many CS professors absolutely fit that bill. However, to the same degree it also demands far more on the software engineering side. People out of academia in general, from every time I've seen them build software, have not been all too impressive on that side of things.
Web search has an incredible demand for being well rounded, beyond anything else I've encountered. CS isn't the hard part bottle-necking everything else, it's just one of the many hard parts.
I salute your efforts and endorse your search engine. I also recognize that you know what it takes to build a search engine.
I don't think you have deep familiarity with EU academia. - The primary goal for academia is to influence society. Publishing is a route to that. - Being head of the EU search engine project would give high academic status - There are hundreds of articles which you could publish on this project - Rock solid CS. Would someone like Knuth count as "rock-solid"? Who is better at CS, the person who can implement quicksort because they practiced leetcode, or the person who invented quicksort? - information retrieval basics. Again, these basics were probably developed in academia.
The skills you say are basic to this endevour are more prevalent in top-quality professors and post-docs than they are in industry.