Existing popular search engines (Google, Bing) are sort of bad. Almost nobody is trying to fix this. [[https://exa.ai/|Exa]] is, but appears to have pivoted toward [[LLM agent]] systems, where they do not have an obvious comparative advantage, and make odd technical decisions such as using IVF/PQ (see [[Vector Indexing]]), apparently hosting things on AWS, and running off disk rather than out of RAM (limiting query throughput: see https://x.com/exaailabs/status/1859690195463045630).

= What should a search engine do?

The job of a search engine is to retrieve useful information for users. This is usually mostly inferred from/determined by the query, but most modern engines make some use of user history and data. How can a search engine work better?

*. Better user intent modelling.
*. Better information sources to retrieve from.
*. Better search, search indexing and understanding of information sources.