[explange]

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.

[klft]

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.

[explange]

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.

[klft]

Interesting feedback. Thanks!

> 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.