Ask HN: Alternative revenue models for search engines?

[symonda]

Search has evolved significantly in the last couple of years and paid search seems to have become a viable business model in addition to advertising based business models.

Yet, there seems to be very limited exploration of alternative revenue models such as bundling search with other (paid) features or products. We are building a curated search engine for startups (https://www.symonda.com) and we want to better understand why this is the case.

Why is there limited innovation in search revenue models and what do you think the future revenue models for custom/curated search engines are?

[mtmail]

There might be good money in finding email addresses. https://hunter.io/pricing has a model of 25 free searches, then paying. Personally I never had the need to find startups.

[symonda]

Interesting example. This type of information is hard to find so the revenue model definitely makes sense.

For many other types of search, the data collection isn't the hard part, instead the difficulty is to make sense of the unstructured data that isn't very hard to collect. That is why I think paid search is difficult to motivate to an end customer.