My hope is that content self-indexes so instead curation it just has to be aggregated.

Depends how tiny the niche is. A few dozen domains is easily done by hand and worth having.

WestLaw and Lexis Nexis provide this for legal search, but quite frankly, these services are subpar. It's amazing that these two companies rake in hundreds of millions but they are both slower than Google, Bing, Yandex, or any LLM service (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) while scouring a universe of text that is orders of magnitude smaller. The user experience is also terrible (you have to login and specify a client each and every time you attempt to use the service and both services log you out after a short -- in my opinion -- period of inactivity, creating friction and needless annoyance to the user). There's an opportunity there.

LN and Westlaw's real service is their ubiquity. Every law student has access to it and every firm expects proficiency. While they generally suck, the last time I used it (looong time ago), their boolean search was quite nice. That kind of text search has mostly been replaced by non-deterministic black boxes which aren't great for legal research.

You forgot to mention their claim of copyright over the bulk of, e.g. obscure state case law.

So, you have to pay to access the law that you are subject to?

If you want it digitized, yes, odd as that seems. You can go find individual prints of it or perhaps digital copies of opinions elsewhere, but those are also technically copyrighted in a lot of cases too.

In some jurisdictions, like Ontario, there are secret agreements that only allow 3 organizations to have digital access to Case Law (https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/). This says a lot about our society, and how much we still have to improve.

They've also got the Microsoft effect going on. Usually at least one of their products like their personal information aggregator used for locating people (like when serving lawsuits) is mandatory for a firm so it's just easier for them bundle everything else in.

I haven't personally used the mentioned services as they aren't in my field, however what is the accuracy of their results? Are they double checked? I don't find LLMs particularly accurate in my field (that's being kind), if anything I find they make up sources that simply don't exist.

I mean poor UX has no excuse but slow speed can be reasoned if it makes the quality of the service better.

Here’s a place to start if you want to go down the rabbit hole of how search at places like this is approached. https://haystackconf.com/us2022/talk-12/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vCMFIJRiKk

Which is not scalable, right?

It's scalable if you are okay with not searching exhaustively.

i know the answer is never distributed services, but if one could build a sufficiently complex SDK to make like a Blue Sky but for niche search indexes, you could chain a bunch of vetted resources together.