[robertjwebb]

I agree - such a search engine would not be as general as Google or Yahoo. But in sacrificing generality it might become better at handling certain types of requests. I am sure that given such a service the community of HN will make light work of finding out what they are :)

[drakaal]

Also it would by hypocritical that it would block sites with ads but likely have to use ads to generate revenue.

As the owner of a search engine I can tell you search ain't cheap.

[robertjwebb]

Yeah. Also, how do you computationally distinguish between a commercial and non-commercial site? Loads of grey areas.

[drakaal]

Our Natural Language / Language Heuristics Engine can do this. We do to a small extent now, we haven't gone whole hog because I'm not sure I agree that commercial sites shouldn't rank. For things we determine to be reference searches we downrank sales pages, for things we determine to be shopping searches we uprank them.

[robertjwebb]

What product are you developing the engine for?