[nobbis]

10 years ago, the original engineer of Google's search engine told me what he now wanted was asynchronous, human-powered search with curated results, e.g. a Google-like interface, but queries cost $5 and take 15 minutes.

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.)

[jimkri]

I'm seeing something similar to this when it comes to Lead generation for sales teams. The market right now is full of tools where you search for companies/prospects that you want to target and you end up with a list that is either outdated or incorrect data.

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expectation setting and also just working with the TAM that understands the impact a curated list will provide over a outdated database.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)

[celdon25]

I would have told him not to quit his day job. That sounds ridiculous.

[nobbis]

I don't agree, plus he's a billionaire.

[leobg]

Why’s he not building it now, then? He has the means.

[nobbis]

Building costs more than money.

[leobg]

True. I’m wondering though if he hasn’t given up on the idea. It’s been ten years. Maybe he doesn’t believe anymore that a human could do better, even if given 15 minutes of time?

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?

[nobbis]

I said "wanted it" not "wanted to build/finance it." Doubt he's given up wanting it.

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.

[mroll]

> the original engineer of Google's search engine

you mean Larry Page?

[nobbis]

No, the guy who re-wrote Larry's research code into Python and put it in production.