I'm interested to hear why you think general web search is pointless. I know that SEO and Google dropping various search functions has made things a little more annoying, but it's still easier to find information than it's ever been.
No it's not, like at all. For nearly every topic I can think of in SW dev, where I usually have a pretty good idea what I'm after, I'm hitting hundreds of naive content-farm clickbait articles when I used to find posts by experts in their blogs, in forums or mailing lists not even ten years ago. At first I blamed Google for sending me to the sites with the most AdWords and Doubleclick ads on them, but with DuckDuckGo consistently giving me just the same results, I believe the problem is rather with the incentives for producing content (or lack thereof), with Google and Facebook having extracted all value out of what used to be "the web". It's not going to improve with ad prices going down the toilet, and Google increasing their efforts of monopolizing every single point of contact as they're struggling to grow. Today if I'm "researching" (not in an academic sense) a topic, I go straight to StackExchange sites, and sites like HN. Life's too short to care about the world of copycat shite that Google indexes; people may find that "searching 456678743 sites in 0.03s" is not, in fact, very useful on the extant web.
As odd as that sounds, I believe there's a market opportunity for a company to start out again like what Google used to be: a search engine used mostly by technical people and searching within a well-defined small circle of websites.
