I don't know of any actual projects to that end, but certainly people have thought about it. I know from personal conversations that Asa Dotzler in particular has given it some very detailed thought, though I don't know if or where he's written up any of those ideas...
Would there be a point in doing that instead of aligning with, say, DuckDuckGo? They share a primary ideology (an open web that works for everyone), and I imagine much of the Firefox userbase and developerbase (perhaps not a majority, but I'd imagine a significant minority) already uses DDG as their primary search engine.
This company was a client where I used to work and seemed very knowledgable and friendly:
http://www.cartika.com
Not really the same as DigitalOcean but they offer VPS hosting with data centers in Canada(and US) and they are based in Toronto(or where 2 years ago, they grew quite big since then)