"Neighborhood searches." I implemented it in my own hackerish way for myself, and does a good job. Unless my search is really out there, I go to my personalized search engine before I go to google...that's saying a lot.

I think it would benefit other people, but I do not have any interest in creating a business around it and since it's a search related technology, it would probably attract lots of traffic if it's any good - and then I'd have to figure out how to afford it/monetize it.

Here's how my implementation works and then some ideas how to take it further:

In my app you add 'buckets' but better named 'neighborhoods' and one is 'Design', another 'Om Philosophies', another 'Business' and another named 'Design Assets'.

Let's say I'm looking for new icons/inspirations of minimal dark design. Normally I'd either google search (lots of misses), or try to think of one of the design sites that post a lot of them and do a "site:" search in it...but now I go to this app and go to Design Assets and search there. Then many links appear underneath like 'smashing magazine' 'six apart' etc; places that have inspiration/asset posts that are generally pretty good. Each of those links is a link to google with my keywords plus the "site:" tag added.

I toyed with google custom searches, but it wasn't as convenient.

My business 'neighborhood' has hacker news, serial entrepeneur, seth godin, personalmba and a bunch of others.

The benefit here is that I don't have to search the entire web (Google/DuckDuckGo). I'm searching a 'pre-selected neighborhood of places that have already proved value to me'.

It'd be neat if I could share the ones I have made with other people, or if my friend who is a molecular biologist could make me a neighborhood for searching on bio stuff. It'd be cool if I could browse some publicly shared ones, but mainly, get the ones my friends have; and even cooler yet, if we can have collaborative neighborhoods where any of us can add sites.

Of course the step after this would be to do the searches yourself (instead of linking to google), so there'd be less clicks but hehe, I don't know if you want to get into it that far...the duck duck go people thought it was worthwhile making new search engines, I don't know though....

I hear searches are the one area of online content where it's easy to make money on advertisement (since people are searching), even if you were just a meta that linked into google in specific ways, perhaps you can monetize that way.

I haven't thought out the business/monetization/complexity of making a search engine ..because my version works for me...saves me lots of time, and I like it. I think other people would like it too, but to share it with them I'd need to put it up on a site, make it so you can't edit it so easily, have not it not be one global list of neighborhoods but instead user-selected ones, maintain that site, figure out where to host it, and frankly, I don't care that much, because I got what I needed...and somewhere in my head I think google/duckduckgo/someone will do this, or something like this...where you can create subsections of the web of your own making, based on your own criteria, and constrain your searches to them, and not just one site like the "site:" filter as is, but neighborhoods of sites.....eventually someone will do this....

...and you can be that eventually, if it sounds worth it to you. i'd prob use it, unless your registration/privacy/other aspects sucked.