Thank you for providing a Steem search other than Google!

Yacy might make your indexing efforts more distributed and cost effective.

Yacy is a great Distributed Search engine. You can host a node that only indexes Steem in collaboration with anyone else who wants to index steem and share results. Yacy runs on Desktops, laptops and servers. Linux, Windows and Mac.

http://yacy.net/en/index.html

There is also a built in interface for your site that works out of the box. Together we are strong. Take a look if you're interested.

I have a basic demo that indexed some of steem and reddit on my Desktop here. http://camb.hopto.org:8090/
(this demo won't be up much longer)

I will be moving it to a proper server soon and begin indexing only distributed networks.

Good luck!