I think there's lots of room for something interesting here.
Partly because google results aren't great at the moment and haven't been great for quite a while and partly because the internet is more balkanised than it was, and often I'd be happy to keep my queries within one of the partitions.
For example, search targetting just the websites that don't sell my data to 300 third parties, or that are available worldwide (not just outside the eu) or search that targets just a curated set of websites that are making an effort to provide authoritative content (e.g. wikipedia, stack overflow, respected news sources, actual academic papers). For searching for things I've recently discovered, search that spiders from aggregators and social media (reddit, hackernews, twitter, facebook) would be most valuable. Search inside audio (podcasts), video and images could also be much better.
If I could bring myself to trust them, I'd want something where every site I visited was spidered and I could do full text search within my own history.
The long tail stuff is hard, but I think it'd be OK to delegate that stuff to currently existing engines, you could provide massive value just by doing a better job of the basics.
Point being, I think the space has quite a lot of potential for disruption despite the challenges.
Partly because google results aren't great at the moment and haven't been great for quite a while and partly because the internet is more balkanised than it was, and often I'd be happy to keep my queries within one of the partitions.
For example, search targetting just the websites that don't sell my data to 300 third parties, or that are available worldwide (not just outside the eu) or search that targets just a curated set of websites that are making an effort to provide authoritative content (e.g. wikipedia, stack overflow, respected news sources, actual academic papers). For searching for things I've recently discovered, search that spiders from aggregators and social media (reddit, hackernews, twitter, facebook) would be most valuable. Search inside audio (podcasts), video and images could also be much better.
If I could bring myself to trust them, I'd want something where every site I visited was spidered and I could do full text search within my own history.
The long tail stuff is hard, but I think it'd be OK to delegate that stuff to currently existing engines, you could provide massive value just by doing a better job of the basics.
Point being, I think the space has quite a lot of potential for disruption despite the challenges.