> Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.

Which is why we need more competitors in this space.

When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the only intrinsic business force is direct monetisation paths... completely different incentives.

Where should the profit come from for a search-oriented product/business?

Because indexing the web and organizing all that information is expensive. It’s also a lot of power so we can’t exactly trust that job to a single government or even a group of allied governments. Universities could potentially handle it by pooling a lot of resources, but I can’t really think of who else I would trust to be The Search Engine. Google isn’t ideal but at least it’s priorities are mostly aligned with the average user’s.

Users?

Imagine that every Internet user pays just one dollar a month. That's still billions worth of revenue, and it can be segmented further such as basic features available for free and more advanced users (such as large-scale API access) can pay more.

Sadly, that's not realistic. You can get a subset of users to pay, but it's vanishingly small compared to everyone who thinks they are perfectly happy with the "free" status quo. Even a dollar a month, it is infinitely more than zero. I just had this conversation with members of my extended family and almost all of them were of the "I don't care if I'm tracked, I've got nothing interesting to hide" mindset, along with "not a chance in hell I'm going to pay for this, or email, when I get them from Google for free."

How about a company that provides a search engine, but as a part of a greater subscription service whose selling point isn't search? Imagine, for example, that paying for Apple One got you access to an Apple-operated search engine.

how about just sell your customers to Google? Apple had do this on Safari

There isn't a single scenario for any product or service anywhere that will get every Internet user to pay a monthly fee - not even for 1¢ a month.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a direct payment. Companies can white-label the service or include it as a value-add as part of their offering; for example an ISP or mobile carrier offering this to their customers.

At the moment I'm not aware of any company whose primary service is search. I believe the demand would be there - OS manufacturers currently have to either put up with Google (even if their goals diverge - for example it doesn't work well with Apple's privacy-focused marketing) or Bing.

A third player whose primary business is search (as opposed to using it as a loss-leader to lure people into their ecosystems, like Google and Bing are) could get some use, not to mention that programmatic access to large web index would no doubt be a service many companies would pay for. Think Algolia or hosted ElasticSearch but pre-seeded with a broad index of the web.

It doesn't have to appeal to every internet user. Not even most internet users. It just has to appeal to enough to make money, which is a substantially smaller number than the total number of internet users.

Governments

From a business model that doesn't make money off ads.

idk if you know this but kagi has a "discussion" filter (among other filters)

You can make custom search engines by selecting an explicit list of sites on top of Google here

https://cse.google.com/all

it requires a google account. I like teddit.net's approach of allowing the user to set up preferences and import them as a json.

Shouldn't there be a way to only search multiple forums through some userscript? Only found out about userscript after messing around with an iOS app called HyperWeb.

At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.

Google has a limit to how long searches can be. So if it’s a complex one, it can’t be too long.

I think you can only specify searching one site at a time. With site: search filter.

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Google’s custom search engine’s where you can give a whitelisted amount of sites isn’t very good. At least not any more. It didn’t include lots of pages it’s main index does. Or the rankings were all out of sorts rendering not useful.

Forums were somewhat decentralized. Without attributing motive, platforms are interested in moving in the opposite direction.

Are there any wrappers for Google search that try to implement a bag of these sorts of workarounds this with a nice UI?

But do those forums run Google ads?

Yes

I feel this same way about a lot of aspects of Google search.

This could be solved with selectable ranking strategies. Of course Google isn't going to offer that.