[technobabbler]

You know, if that were the only roadblock, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the latest findings and queries.

Would happily pay for that... even if it only has 5% of the coverage of Google, that's fine because Google is like 95% noise anyway.

[jasode]

>, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the latest findings and queries.

It's not exactly your specifications but 2007 Mahalo attempted something like that and they shut down after a few years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com

The website is no longer there so you have to use Wayback Machine or image search to see what the landing page for Mahalo search UI looked like : https://www.google.com/search?q=%22mahalo.com%22+search&tbm=...

[Sujan]

The top 10.000 queries at Google are probably 99% brands, pop culture or current news things, one word or name only, that you would not care for at all. Have a look at the top 20: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265825/number-of-searche...

[achr2]

I think there is an easy exclusion to be made for these types of 'too lazy to type a url' type searches (or 'weather' which is similar in getting a specific piece of data).

[heavenlyblue]

I remember one of the top queries we worked at one company with was the number of the US form to fill your taxes

[shisisms]

The problem is, you probably won’t pay for it.

Google’s revenue per user in the US underlines that point, taking a credit card out for an annual subscription for a $100 probably isn’t going to score a good conversion rate for anything beyond a very small userbase.

The predicted economic/behavioural constraints are inhibiting innovation. You’re forced to play Google’s game.

[technobabbler]

I'd gladly pay for a good search engine, but I'm probably in the minority.

[nr2x]

You just invented pre-Google Yahoo!

[technobabbler]

I know. I remember and loved it then.

[nr2x]

I also remember altavista and the like and how bad they were. When google came on the scene it was a total game changer.

[technobabbler]

Google was definitely better than the algorithmic crawlers. But Yahoo often still had gems for a while, a few years maybe, before they gave up. It's too bad.

[jonshariat]

+1 I see this repeated over and over in tech where an algo is great but why not manually craft the top value queries?

Like with smart speakers, why not manually add a bunch of interactions? You can do it yourself in settings by adding a phrase and desired response, why not have the team adding a bunch they would want?

[mbg721]

Isn't that more or less what Yahoo was supposed to be (an index of curated links)?

[technobabbler]

Yes. There was a period of several years when Google's results were better than Yahoo, but once the human search engines bankrupt, the algorithmic SEO just kept getting worse and worse =/ Too bad...

[eternityforest]

That would be awesome!