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Comment by _puk | Hacker News Reader

Quite the generalisation..

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.

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Sure, but the comment I replied to did not talk about a "niche" search engine. If you find a specific area of search that there is no good search engine for, or if existing products are really bad, of course you may succeed in that space, probably because you're at that point targeting the enterprise market -- but expecting normal consumers to pay for a search engine is naive at best.

Because Lexis has a massive database of news stories and the rights to share it.

I would wager that Google's database of new stories is bigger. LexisNexis survives partly through institutional inertia, but also I expect because they've tailored their search product to their specific niche in a way that is much more useful than Google's general-purpose algorithms.

I would wager that Google's database of new stories is bigger.

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.

Google's news articles goes back way further than the 70's. They've been scanning newspapers and integrating digitization archives. This is why you can you can look at word usage trends centuries back. But it's not very well integrated into search.

Google news doesn’t have great archives nor does it vet sources which is essential for research use cases.

Lexis survives because it’s a phenomenal product.

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