I used to work at a comparison search engine that basically didn't have the resources to devote to searching. We kept pushing for more resources allocated to th

I used to work at a comparison search engine that basically didn't have the resources to devote to searching. We kept pushing for more resources allocated to this, but we just didn't have the bandwidth and/or capable engineers that were really experts at information retrieval. Another engineer and I attempted to get search working right, but the difficulty when it comes to search is overwhelming and just not an easy engineering feat. Advanced search integration for integral user experience features, such as understanding user intention, query disambiguation, search term boosting, information metadata, typeahead, etc were very difficult to get right, hard to really test, and required lots of knowledge about information retrieval -- which a domain that not many engineers are familiar with. I think a service that provides an easy to use API and allows the ability for companies to easily and effortlessly address some of the concerns above is always in need.