I have never in my life paid for a search engine, even though I’m not at all happy with the results from Google or Bing, because I detest subscriptions and because I had the impression that there aren’t any paid search engines good enough to blow those big ones out of the water. (That said, this impression might be mistaken.)
And as an individual I wouldn’t pay for a search engine just limited to rationalist sites. That kind of thing would provide me a bit of utility, but certainly not enough to warrant a paid subscription (yuck).
Also, when I browse, I usually want to have exactly one search bar where I can enter any arbitrary queries and get a result, without having to use a separate search engine for specific queries. The only situation where I am delighted to use another search engine is geizhals.de, a German price comparison site which produces really neat tables for comparison shopping of electronics. And that’s a case where the search provides obvious monetary value (via savings on purchases) and is nonetheless as free as anything else on the Internet (i.e. financed by ads and affiliate links etc.).
Overall, I can’t imagine that there would be a sufficient market for such a search engine among the user base, so I figure your actual customers (or funders) would have to be those rationalist and EA sites or grantmakers themselves.
E.g. I really don’t like the search function on LW[1], to the point that I prefer to use third-party search engines like Google to search for LW stuff. But I don’t know whether the LW team (and by extension the EA Forum team, who use the same software) also considers their search to be a problem, and if so, if they would be able and willing to pay for an improvement.
PS: If you’re considering using AI to improve search, another idea which could improve discoverability would be to auto-tag the LW corpus. The tags seem like a good system, but asking authors and readers to manually tag posts just doesn’t work.
As an example, searching for “harry potter and the methods of rationality” displays 3 random users, then 9 supplementary posts, and only then lists the “The Methods of Rationality” sequence, which is book 1 of HPMOR. This is the default search order sorted by “Relevance”. Sorting by karma makes the results even worse, e.g. the top result is now the preface to Rationality: AI to Zombies.
I have so many bookmarks that I’m drowning in (mostly rationalist-adjacent) stuff to read, and I don’t immediately see how even a fantastically powerful search engine could help here.
For me to even consider paying a subscription, I must obviously get way more value out of it each month than I put in in money. That means it must save me significant chunks of time or money. I don’t immediately see how a search engine which is limited to a subset of websites is supposed to do that, or what it is supposed to offer that’s orders of magnitude better than just sorting LW by the posts with the most karma.
And even if your product managed to meet that bar, then you’d need to fulfill a second requirement, namely that there must not exist any competitors who can do what you offer except better, cheaper, or for free (as in, financed via ads etc.). E.g. Google is free, and supports limiting queries to specific domains.
Also consider that essentially no individual users on the Internet currently pay for search; it’s considered a free service. And the offer you’ve been describing so far sounds worse, namely more expensive and more limited. Maybe there’s a way to produce so much value that a subscription is a slamdunk, but I haven’t heard any sufficiently impressive value proposition yet.
That’s why I figured that an economically more sensible approach would be to offer helping to improve the search on LW and the EA Forum. Those sites are already home to a significant fraction of the rationalist userbase, plus it seems much easier for them to generate significant extra value from better search.
EDIT: And fundamentally, so far I have the impression that you already have some technical solution in mind, and now you’re searching for a problem to solve. From what I understand of startups (not much), isn’t that exactly the wrong approach? E.g. usual recommendations for startup ideas sound more like “solve a problem you have yourself”.
Suppose you wanted to find content on prioritizing what you read by people with similar interests or with higher standards than most writers in the google search results.
Do you expect a search of LW will be more likely to deliver what you want than a search of LW +100 other sites?
>Google is free, and supports limiting queries to specific domains.
The limit is ten sites.
>just search LW or EA
What if you could do both in one place plus search all these and the ACX’s blogroll and similar sites?
>solution in search of a problem
Google search quality seems to not satisfy a large number of people: link. Not to say this idea will fix that for everyone.
>value delivered
What if it cost $1-6 a month? Would you try it if it was free? Would you donate once or regularly if you liked it?
I have never in my life paid for a search engine, even though I’m not at all happy with the results from Google or Bing, because I detest subscriptions and because I had the impression that there aren’t any paid search engines good enough to blow those big ones out of the water. (That said, this impression might be mistaken.)
And as an individual I wouldn’t pay for a search engine just limited to rationalist sites. That kind of thing would provide me a bit of utility, but certainly not enough to warrant a paid subscription (yuck).
Also, when I browse, I usually want to have exactly one search bar where I can enter any arbitrary queries and get a result, without having to use a separate search engine for specific queries. The only situation where I am delighted to use another search engine is geizhals.de, a German price comparison site which produces really neat tables for comparison shopping of electronics. And that’s a case where the search provides obvious monetary value (via savings on purchases) and is nonetheless as free as anything else on the Internet (i.e. financed by ads and affiliate links etc.).
Overall, I can’t imagine that there would be a sufficient market for such a search engine among the user base, so I figure your actual customers (or funders) would have to be those rationalist and EA sites or grantmakers themselves.
E.g. I really don’t like the search function on LW[1], to the point that I prefer to use third-party search engines like Google to search for LW stuff. But I don’t know whether the LW team (and by extension the EA Forum team, who use the same software) also considers their search to be a problem, and if so, if they would be able and willing to pay for an improvement.
PS: If you’re considering using AI to improve search, another idea which could improve discoverability would be to auto-tag the LW corpus. The tags seem like a good system, but asking authors and readers to manually tag posts just doesn’t work.
As an example, searching for “harry potter and the methods of rationality” displays 3 random users, then 9 supplementary posts, and only then lists the “The Methods of Rationality” sequence, which is book 1 of HPMOR. This is the default search order sorted by “Relevance”. Sorting by karma makes the results even worse, e.g. the top result is now the preface to Rationality: AI to Zombies.
What utility would it need to provide to change your mind?
How about a search of sites curated for a higher level of epistemics? Can you think of any searches you might do where that would be useful?
Suppose it cost between $2-6 a month? Or, what price point would be enticing for you to try it?
I have so many bookmarks that I’m drowning in (mostly rationalist-adjacent) stuff to read, and I don’t immediately see how even a fantastically powerful search engine could help here.
For me to even consider paying a subscription, I must obviously get way more value out of it each month than I put in in money. That means it must save me significant chunks of time or money. I don’t immediately see how a search engine which is limited to a subset of websites is supposed to do that, or what it is supposed to offer that’s orders of magnitude better than just sorting LW by the posts with the most karma.
And even if your product managed to meet that bar, then you’d need to fulfill a second requirement, namely that there must not exist any competitors who can do what you offer except better, cheaper, or for free (as in, financed via ads etc.). E.g. Google is free, and supports limiting queries to specific domains.
Also consider that essentially no individual users on the Internet currently pay for search; it’s considered a free service. And the offer you’ve been describing so far sounds worse, namely more expensive and more limited. Maybe there’s a way to produce so much value that a subscription is a slamdunk, but I haven’t heard any sufficiently impressive value proposition yet.
That’s why I figured that an economically more sensible approach would be to offer helping to improve the search on LW and the EA Forum. Those sites are already home to a significant fraction of the rationalist userbase, plus it seems much easier for them to generate significant extra value from better search.
EDIT: And fundamentally, so far I have the impression that you already have some technical solution in mind, and now you’re searching for a problem to solve. From what I understand of startups (not much), isn’t that exactly the wrong approach? E.g. usual recommendations for startup ideas sound more like “solve a problem you have yourself”.
>drowning in stuff to read
Suppose you wanted to find content on prioritizing what you read by people with similar interests or with higher standards than most writers in the google search results.
Do you expect a search of LW will be more likely to deliver what you want than a search of LW +100 other sites?
>Google is free, and supports limiting queries to specific domains.
The limit is ten sites.
>just search LW or EA
What if you could do both in one place plus search all these and the ACX’s blogroll and similar sites?
>solution in search of a problem
Google search quality seems to not satisfy a large number of people: link. Not to say this idea will fix that for everyone.
>value delivered
What if it cost $1-6 a month? Would you try it if it was free? Would you donate once or regularly if you liked it?