[forgotusername]

How about "I'll pay you $50 if you stop trying to repeatedly screw me, and drop the +1 buttons while you're at it". It's not like the average consumer can live easily without search, so why not straight up charge for it, like we do every other utility on the planet.

There is some broken cultural obsession with making this stuff free, and that Next Big Search must have automatic "web scale" appeal to the entire planet and cater to all needs and use cases simultaneously.

I'd happily pay for a curated, spam free index if that index satisfied 90% of my needs, retaining privacy raping, up-selling free search for the remaining 10%. About 50% of my search traffic is already in the form of keyword searches pointed at IMDB/Wikipedia/eBay/Amazon site-specific search, so why not just wrap this up for me.

Hugely complex automation, web scale, index freshness, instant search, deep web blah blah, and all the other costly noise I care a good deal less about. Sometimes thinking small doesn't hurt that much.

And if you look at what I'm saying from the right angle, you might even see a thousand untapped niches for industry/lifestyle specific companies collecting money from consumers in their segment and passing it to retailers who charge for access to their (otherwise hidden behind proprietary apps) catalogues. I've no idea why this isn't more common already, it's as if the entire industry has been frightened into believing that using computers to find things we already know exist to be an insanely difficult task.

[sciurus]

Downvoted for language, FYI.

"About 50% of my search traffic is already in the form of keyword searches pointed at IMDB/Wikipedia/eBay/Amazon site-specific search, so why not just wrap this up for me."

Do you like how DuckDuckGo handles this?

[forgotusername]

Fair enough point on the language, I've toned it down.

As for DDG, kinda but not really. There is a fundamental disconnect between my everyday needs on a computer and the kind of needs that Big Search apparently inexorably must accomplish (and fashionably heralded by the industry in forums like HN), that DDG attempts to emulate.

Most of the time I want to access my trusted vendors (bank, shop, eBay, ...) and a search engine is supposed to be my entry page to achieve that. But say, as I just searched on DDG now for "The Art Of Computer Programming", I get (from my perspective) trusted results from Wikipedia and Amazon, mixed in with crappy spam from freebookzone.com and so on.

My point is that I don't care about that freebookzone.com link, it's a (difficult) problem my ideal search engine would not be attempting to solve.

I am DMW, I pay you $50/year because you don't try to spelling correct programming language identifiers, and for the privilege of you knowing that 90% of the time when I search for a book I want you to send me to Amazon UK, even if I'm connected from Estonia, and apply these rules because I told you them somehow (say, during signup). If your results are incomplete, then provide me with access to some separate deep web mining/ranking service, who I'd expect are paid a cut of my subscription to gain access to.

[true_religion]

I know that domain specific search engines for finance charge per usage.