[kingsuper20]

>I honestly wonder if there might be room in the market for a paid-membership search engine that included only a curated set of sites.

I know basically nothing of the mechanics of search, although I expect that a boutique search engine would have trouble accessing the guts of third party sites as they don't want to get hammered by the world.

I did just think of an interesting specialty engine. If you had fast access to the full library on libgen or sci-hub, a person could produce a pretty interesting set of abilities.

[dcminter]

I know enough to know I don't know much :) But there's plenty of documentation out there.

My impression is that if you're not dealing with people trying to game the algorithm then it's all a lot simpler.

As to data sources - with a constrained set of sites the creation of custom adapters should be do-able I'd have thought.

Not that I have any plans. Maybe I should though :)

Edit: come to think of it, it's practically an internet law that stuff you think of already exists. So maybe I should just post an Ask HN for the link to the search engine in question...

[kingsuper20]

An interesting meta-problem comes with success of a curated search engine. The sites it actually supports would themselves have to be curated as otherwise the camel's nose gets back into the tent.

[dcminter]

Yeah, exactly. Either not successful enough to game or... Nice problem to have? Maybe?

(I have similar thoughts about diacussion fora fwiw)