Hey there!
Search in the web is becoming problematic. Quality is decreasing and competition is extremely hard.
Some time ago I came to the realisation that the biggest strength of Google might also be its Achilles heel. Google is forced to create a list of links because that's the main vehicle where they drive profit from. If you were to send a question like "Who is Barack Obama?" you still will get a list of links although google knows there is a canonical answer.
However, if you were to build a new search engine from the ground up you would need to build the infrastructure to crawl the web, crawl it, index it and build the interface. That will take a lot of money and time to test one idea. And there are multiple possible attack vectors to Google's business model (privacy, subscription model, modality, etc.). You might get the chance of testing one of them, and if that fails, starting again is super expensive so you might not be able to.
My idea is to have a single open web index database, continuously updated so that you can apply ranking and embedding algorithms to it. This would reduce the cost of entry, and enable developers to build competitors to google on top of it, or create new products in the search space (for instance, a search engine for clothes). I don't know if this is interesting for anyone but if it is, hit me up.
