Why it dies

This isn't a startup, it's a museum exhibit with a Stripe account. PageRank was patented, commercialized, and then eclipsed by the same company that invented it — search stopped being a link-counting problem two decades ago and is now a language-model, spam-war, index-scale, and distribution problem you cannot touch without billions in crawl infrastructure and a default browser deal. 'No banner ads' isn't a moat, it's a suicide note: you've removed the only revenue model that ever made search viable while offering nothing a user would switch defaults for. Backlink ranking today is a spam farm's playground, not a signal. The clean homepage was Google's opening move, not a differentiator you can reclaim.

What would save it

Nothing about ranking-by-links survives. The only seed worth keeping is 'search without the ad-poisoned, SEO-gamed slop' — and that only lives as a vertical: pick one domain (case law, academic papers, code, obscure hobby communities) where general search genuinely fails, and win that narrow, defensible slice before you ever dream the word 'engine.'