I admire the initiative but there is no way people will pay for a search engine.
To provide a counter generalisation, I am sure a certain percentage would pay for a niche search engine if it provided specific value.
I mean, LexisNexis news search exists, and is far from free.
You are correct. Lexis only has 35k news sources. Their one strength is that their news archive goes back to the late 70s.
The real difference is that Lexis's core business is B2B. Enterprise pricing defies the laws of reason for what people will pay for software vs B2C.
Lexis survives because it’s a phenomenal product.
May I know the niche that you are referring to? Also, how do other search engines like DuckDuckGo performs against Google?
I think there are other jobs that probably face this kind of problem, for example: policymakers, management consultants, journalists, nonfiction writers, some kinds of investors. They all need to rapidly learn things in topics outside of their expertise.
I haven't found other search engines much better, although I haven't yet done a systematic test. One thing that puts me off them is it seems from their marketing copy that most alternative search engines like Duck Duck Go are focusing entirely on being a privacy-preserving alternative. I want one that is focused on quality (and customisability), not just privacy.
I tried to install Searx so that I could at least get results from a variety of engines. But I got stuck in some dependency yakshaving so gave up.
The biggest hurdle I found no way around is the content. Not all but a lot of high-quality information is paid. You get access to it as a user but not if you want to index it as a platform. And you need a lot of different providers to have good coverage. That might get easier if you have lots of users, but you do not get users without content. The platform chicken-egg problem.
Profitable niches like Bloomberg’s business information definitively exist but this would not be the high-quality generic search engine you described.
- Downweighting commercial sources and upweighting academic, government, and nonprofit sources.
- Using some measure of quality, maybe even something simple like length + reading age?
- Building big whitelists of quality sites and blacklists of low-quality sites, as picked by human curators and users
Beyond this, perhaps users could plug in sources that are particularly useful for them, including ones they have subscriptions to. I've thought it would be handy to have search results include ebooks, papers, and notes on my computer, for example.
But maybe the userbase of people who need high quality, non-subscription info is too small to get this started.
> a lot of high-quality information isn't paid
Maybe I was biased towards paid content because I did an enterprise search project on scientific articles before.
> users could plug in sources that are particularly useful for them
That could work if you have a local copy of the data which can be indexed. E-Book DRM might be a problem.
> But maybe the userbase of people who need high quality, non-subscription info is too small to get this started.
That was my impression. I almost always got puzzled looks when I described the idea. And most of those people were “knowledge workers”. But if you are a specialist, you already know where to look for the information you need in your area of expertise.
Also, there are people who pay for API calls to a search engine, for example Bing Search. Again, it's not the same as users paying a monthly subscription for unlimited access, but someone is paying in the end.
1) Build a better/equal search engine to that of Google
2) Convince people it's better enough that it's worth paying for, or that their privacy matters enough that they should pay to not use Google.
3) Maintain your costs of operation and make a profit
There is no way I would invest in a company that attempted this, but as I said, I admire someone that would try.
For what it is worth Google has been busy lowering that bar for about 10 years:
- lower quality results
- dumber ads
- more nauseating practices generally
I'd like to no however that last summer the most brain dead ads disappeared and the last few weeks I've seen decent search results (2009 quality) twice.
When Google is good old Google from 2009 - where they return the exact weird quoted thing I seached for - then I actually consider going back.
I've lost so many hours on google that the cost would make itself up. Just yesterday stuck in another gRut, looking for "what is X" to receive nothing but "how to implement X!".
Valuable hours lost every week. I'd happily pay for a search engine that just got it right.
See bullet #2. https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-...