Common Search – nonprofit search engine for the Web
One thing I hope this project does that Google fails to do is give developers a good API to access search. Google closed down their first web search API and now only give developers access to a limited Custom Search API that's rate limited to 100 queries a day for free with a hard limit of 10k searches - that makes it either very hard to develop anything against or relatively expensive. There are other options (Bing, Faroo, raw access to CommonCrawl) but they're either low quality or hard to work with. A good quality, straightforward, open web search API would be awesome.