Let's say I wanted to build a web scraper + search engine product that did not feature ads at all. What other funding models exist? How viable are they?

In particular, what if you sold anonymized data about trends/insights into consumer behavior to other businesses? At scale, is it conceivable that such a strategy would be profitable?

Under this model, the search results would be incentivized to be as accurate as possible. There would be incentives against influencing rankings to maximize profits (which differs from the classic display ads and the Google Ad Words models) because you would want your understanding of consumer behavior to be as untainted as possible.

Thoughts?