The article articulates the problems well: 1. The ad-supported search engine business models have led to the creation of massive quantities of low-quality, irr

The article articulates the problems well: 1. The ad-supported search engine business models have led to the creation of massive quantities of low-quality, irrelevant content that those search engines are drowning now in themselves. 2. Ad-supported search exposes fundamental conflict of interest in such search engine UX - serve the user or serve the advertiser? 'Boutique' search engines are not a new idea. I have used same.energy [1] to search for images and that was probably the best image search I've seen. I've used marginalia [2] to find an interesting article about a broad topic I was interested in. The problem is not in the lack of boutique search engines, it is that using them in this way (one search engine for each type of query) is not convenient. If we extrapolate the future to having 100 finest boutique search engines, how are we going to remember to use them, especially if the use is seldom? Browsers will let you set only one main search engine. While you can have more with shortcuts, you still need to remember them. The nature of searching is such that we want to spend 99% of time in our primary search engine. It should then be the the job of that primary search engine to be aware of the 100 boutique search engines and pull the data from them, all happening transparently for the user. The user is then presented with best possible results for their query, assembled by carefully crafted algorithms that take results both from horizontal and vertical indexes. This has been called 'meta-search engine' concept before although I prefer the term 'search engine client' similar to how we have 'email clients'. Having access to high quality search engine clients will allow the existence of high quality boutique search engines, as the two eco-systems need each other. Furthermore, the search engine client should also have tools to allow user to curate on its own and share this with other users. Want to blacklist domains? Want to create 'programming' results that suit your interests? This should be possible. These concept are being explored in Kagi Search [3] (disclaimer: founder) and what makes all this possible today is the transition to paid search as a product, breaking the spell of the ad-supported search and allowing us to finally focus only on the user and their needs. [1] https://same.energy https://same.energy [2] https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ [3] https://kagi.com https://kagi.com