Emerging Investment Opportunities: Specialized Search Engines

I recently started taking a look into Angel Investing and thought that this may be interesting series of articles to start as part of my research. These are all emerging areas with high potential that I think could be worth taking a look at. If you have insight into Angel Investing or this field, I would love to talk to you! Please feel to reach out using this link.

Whenever we think about searching something, we almost always will just go on Google and type whatever it is we are looking for. For the most part Google does a pretty good job in this, giving us relevant results. However, because Google is a general search engine, there is a limitation to what it can do. This inability to focus on something specific opens up a big market opportunity for specialized search engines to come and fill in the gap.

We can already validate this working together. Let me show a real life example of this today. Let’s say I am developing something and wanted to find the code snippet Sprintf(“%d -file:tests utilized in public web repositories.

If I search up this up on Google I get the following result:

Google’s return for the code snippet

Somewhat helpful but not really what I was looking for. But if I now use a specialized search engine like SourceGraph, we get the following:

SourceGraph return for the code snippet

This is not only exactly what I am looking for, it is also in a format designed to optimize the results for me.

This is a very blatant example but just goes to show how specialized search engines can exist in tandem with something like Google. All they have to do is find a specific case Google and other general engines do not specifically tailor their experience for. Thus they can range from the code search we just saw to an engine that tailors for searching through Reddit Posts. The possibilities are really endless!

This is without even mentioning the massive potential that B2B search engines have. When you have massive organizations, it can be tough to for employees to find the documentation and other assets they need for their work. A search engine tailored to connect these parts could go a long way in helping alleviate this and ultimately save employees a lot of time and resources.

According to IBISWorld, in 2021 the Search Engine industry is worth 82.9 billion dollars and, over a 5 year span, has grown a an average 8.4% per year! Even if you capture 0.05% of that worth, that is 41.4 million dollars, which is more than enough money to incentivize entrepeneurs.

This is a really interesting field that I would seriously consider looking into as a contributor or investor. Some examples of companies already in the space are the aforementioned Source Graph, Alexandrya.ai and Jobian.

I would love to hear your thoughts on Specialized Search Engines or any other emerging fields that you think are coming up! I hope to have more articles coming out soon with more fields I am interested in!

If you want to see more content from me or would like to connect, feel free to check out the link below:

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Thanks for reading,

Daivik Goel