I work on alternative search engines, my first was something called Whize which flared for a bit, hit the front page of product hunt and then died after a few months of trying to support a search experience that we've all become used to ala Google.

We had thousands of users stopping through over the months but that's not enough for an AD supported model and ultimately indexing the web with a significant enough amount of coverage so that results weren't lacking and then working on a novel enough ranking methodology that combined vector search signals with classical search signals is a massive undertaking that was running us thousands of dollars a month.

It's possible but you need to basically be prepared to burn a lot of money, more than I and my friend were willing to support. That's why most of these alternative search engines serve custom Google results combined with other aggregator content or license Bing and they produce good results but at the end of the day your still beholden to the index and to some degree the ranking signals of the engines your building over.

So far in the landscape Kagi is doing a good job on establishing itself with it's use of lens and subscriber based support for it's boutique engine. Neeva and You.com are also both in that space and have the benefit of being supported by gobs of funding (Neeva in particular due to the background of the founding team.)

All of these engines are attempting to provide the curated experience this article talks about in the form of programmatic boutique like searches over Google and Bing's existing index. From a technical standpoint this makes obvious sense.

But.

From the year+ of working on that search engine and my continued interest in alternative search engines here's the thing. Google and Bing index web pages, but there are so many alternative forms of curated information we've created over the last decade and a lot of that information is in semi-public spaces like slack, discord, whatsapp, telegram, facebook groups, newsletters etc.

As more and more spam has propagated over the internet real useful information and discourse has retreated into these semi guarded spaces that the existing incumbents do not index and do not serve which means all of these respective engines are missing that information which means in turn you're missing that information regardless of where you search.

Want to buy a car? The best review of what car to buy is probably happening in a car enthusiast discord or slack maybe an e-mail newsletter. But you won't see that. So my opinion? I think the next real killer search application is going to figure out how to index and make that content searchable not an alternative take on searching web pages.