Money's no object for him, so he wanted to outsource the filtering, ranking, and interpreting of results. Would be even more useful today (albeit a tiny TAM.)
One of the solutions is to hire people remotely that will build a list from searching and verifying that the information is correct. There are a ton of scaling issues with a person building the lists, and you will still run into errors, but it has been the best way to verify and have the most up-to-date data.
A problem I noticed is people are so use to getting tons of results when they use Google or another database site, so they expect the same with human-powered results. SO I think a lot of expectation setting and also just working with the TAM that understands the impact a curated list will provide over a outdated database. Both have their costs but for a higher impact the human curation will always win over automation. (I have an example of 3 different lead gen sites having a different city for 1 company, the AI on the websites mixed up the location, a Human would be able to catch that)
If such a demand exists, should we not be seeing an active “secondary marketplace” for people offering to do 15-minute human meta search & research tasks?
A human can always do better: take Google's results, then remove SEO spam/duplicates, extract more relevant snippets, combine results from multiple nearby queries, etc.
Demand exists, but someone has to build it. And it's unclear how big the market is.
you mean Larry Page?