| I love this. I've been thinking about something similar lately. There are so few good indexes and search engines for niche collections of data. Imagine if there was a niche search engine for everything, and the search engine was customized for that niche. I think the main problems here are: - Data format and ingestion
- Domain-specific indexing/relevance Most data is super messy and it not accessible through nice APIs, which presents a problem. You might need custom ingestion for each niche and it's pretty likely you'll need some rules to standardize data from multiple sources, neither of which seems easy to generalize and automate because they're very domain-specific. The other part to this is indexing/relevance so the search feels good to use. Some fields are obviously going to be more important than others and people are going to want to utilize search for things that are to predict ahead of time. To use the authors example of artists in Brooklyn, people might want to search for artists near them. Now you have to gather location data, format it, ingest it, index it and add it to the search UI. The fact that adding another field to index on is a vertical integration adds a lot of overhead. All of this stuff in isolation is not difficult, but when you put it together it becomes quite a lot of work that generally isn't easily scalable. |