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Reminds me of this classic pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Specifically this quote: "The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine."

There has been a lot of grumblings about the state of search these days. Maybe the time is nigh for a new search engine?



I feel that we should go down the adblock hosts list approach, where people download website lists from individuals they trust who have curated or scraped links of websites complete with keywords, and its up to the user to refresh their lists and then perform a search on their website.txt file

It will be limited, but still quite powerful, similar to the way that we can pick and choose different host file sources from the web.


Does anyone else remember StumbleUpon? It's not exactly the same as a search engine, but that worked really well for finding interesting content back in the day.


I've wondered if this can be built with a limited budget, in terms of cloud costs. At least it feels like you'd need a lot of hosts to satisfactorily index the web, and store the results so that you can return results instantaneously.


With limited budget and the right results, I think people would pay with “non-instant” results. Even 5-10 seconds might be perfectly fine, and that’s “easy” on a limited budget.




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