I am going to build my own search engine but with a monthly subscription fee. No ads, no tracking and I don't keep logs of your activity. So across between a VPN and a Search engine!
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.
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.
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.
I and/or the company I work for would. Google is awful for finding the kind of high quality, niche information I need in my job. It just returns lowest common denominator rubbish.
As I wrote in my other reply, there was no mention of a "niche" search engine in the comment I replied to. Yes, there are future business opportunities and past examples of search succeeding in areas where Google is lacking: but when people think of a general "search engine" they think of a competitor to Google for regular Internet users, and there is no way that would be a viable business model.
> I and/or the company I work for would. Google is awful for finding the kind of high quality, niche information I need in my job. It just returns lowest common denominator rubbish.
May I know the niche that you are referring to? Also, how do other search engines like DuckDuckGo performs against Google?
I'm a consultant/researcher advising charitable foundations. It means I need to research all sorts of different topics depending on what area the foundation is interested in. e.g. one project might be on humanitarian aid, another on educational technology, another on infectious disease. So I don't need a search engine in a particular niche, I need a search engine that is good at finding high quality information in multiple niches. By high quality information I mean a mixture of academic articles, expert blog posts, podcasts with experts, policy reports, books, expert tweets, quality journalism etc.
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.
A few years ago, I investigated if there is a business opportunity in quality search.
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.
That's really interesting to know, thanks. I think for my purposes a lot of high-quality information isn't paid - it's academic, policy, and nonprofit sources mainly. I feel like you could make a lot of improvement for my purposes just by:
- 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.
I remember years ago there was a desktop application for Windows called Copernic Agent. It was a meta search tool that combined results from multiple search engines. It had free and paid versions. It's not exactly the same as paying for a search engine, but it's close enough. It looks like it's abandoned now and the company moved on to desktop and enterprise file searching.
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.
A paid search engine could work once it proves itself. This means they need to put a significant amount of work and server resources into it first, get a critical mass of users and then they can make it paid.
> 1) Build a better/equal search engine to that of Google
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.
Not that I'm going to be the average user here, but I'm desperate to pay for a search engine that works like I want.
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.
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!".
Doesn't a monthly fee mean you'll require users to sign in? In the purest sense that's tracking, you're just promising to immediately forget all of the correlations you're making between users and queries. I think you'd need a privacy policy/payment contract that adds a liability to the business to maintain privacy for users to trust that you aren't and wont track them.