* Rudimentary search is solvable with OSS tools nowadays (Solr, Sphinx, Lucene).
* OCR however, seems fun! I never pay attention much on character recognition software. I wonder how good is this project: http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/
Evernote's OCR ended up being a non-feature as far as I was concerned because you can only search within the OCR'd text, you can't extract it and do anything else.
Here's a few, "I could solve this in a weekend" solutions:
* Write notes with vim and archive them with git. If using github, you get website publishing for free.
* Write notes with nano and automatically upload to S3 using inotify (Python: http://pyinotify.sourceforge.net)
* Write notes with emacs and mail() it to your gmail account.
* Write notes for future reminder (+dates) with ed. Via cron, parse the dates using GNU date, and mail() yourself a reminder.
If we are the target market, so few of us are willing to pay for the service.
Just my 2 cents...