Yeah, it is very fun actually. I was not expecting this much joy tbh. I am also playing on game pass.

The wandering village

I host an instance of searxng and I am quite happy with it. It displays results of a combination of engines. If you want to spin up your own, I have a blog that explains how to do in basic steps : https://mustafacanyucel.com/blog/blog-13.html

I ❤️ FairMail. It is so customizable and versatile, I even bought the pro version for support.

For news aggregation and summary, I totally agree with you. For just search indexing and referring, though, I think paying just for a link that is no more than 10 words is not justified. If I post a link in this comment from a Canadian news site, should I pay a fee, too? Because section 2 part b states that access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.