Survey completed
Looks like you are thinking about Yacy? :)
You mention sub par results in your survey. If you are referring to Yacy results, you will find that they will be much better and faster on a real node instead of what you've seen on my minimal demo https://steemit.com/steem/@camb/distributed-steemit-search-engine-yacy-p2p-web-search
Also you will not need to find active participants to join your distributed Steem index. Yacy will automatically connect your node with others.
Thank you, and yes I am looking into YaCy. I'll keep in mind that on a full p2p network the results would be of better quality, however, I believe that there are still some limitations to using machine learning and click through analysis for ranking.
I've tried hosting the centralized Opensearchserver for other projects before and found it to be far to resource intensive. Is that what you're running?
Right now AskSteem uses a customized version of ElasticSearch with our own ranking algorithm.