symonda

I think there are quite a few startups in this sector, see for instance: https://www.symonda.com/search?query=buildings+construction

Our goal is to help people discover, test and validate startup ideas. We believe that a powerful free-text search engine is the best way to achieve this.

At this time, we focus on helping people find companies via their product and service offerings and not so much on 'who they are' (i.e. company characteristics, investors etc..). This is a fundamental difference to those platforms you mention.

I was is in a similar position some time ago (albeit with a very different product).

Long story short: Understanding the complexities of why a certain problem remains under-addressed was difficult in our case. As a result, we ended up pivoting into the direction of helping (potential) founders validate ideas through a specialized search engine of startups. We just launched a beta version of this on https://www.symonda.com - while many features are still lacking, maybe it can still be a useful resource.

This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.

This is a good point. The problem is that it is very hard to make a living serving high-quality results which is likely why ad-funded search still dominates. The vast majority of the world will likely never want to pay for search on its own.

There are, of course, a few relatively successful paid general purpose search engines but these serve a niche demographic if you consider the world-wide scale of google et al. Possibly specialized search (we build one) will be able to thrive in the future, but these engines also serve niche markets in the end.

Thus, the real competition to ad-based search is not high quality search and that is likely why search results don't get better.

Interesting example. This type of information is hard to find so the revenue model definitely makes sense.

For many other types of search, the data collection isn't the hard part, instead the difficulty is to make sense of the unstructured data that isn't very hard to collect. That is why I think paid search is difficult to motivate to an end customer.