I recently put some effort into making it possible to run and host the system fairly easily[1]. That said, serving basic search data and operating a search engine is two different things. To do more than index a couple of blogs you inevitably need a fairly deep understanding of the system, probably decent hardware, and so on.
But the long term goal is that this is something that's relatively easy to operate and extend.
I can't speak to how much energy it is to go from code to serving requests, but FWIW the code is AGPLv3 and seems to be updated regularly https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/blob/v2...