Search engine restricted to your own trusted-site whitelist
Problem
AI-generated slop and SEO spam make general search results unreliable. People want to search only across a hand-picked list of trusted websites (e.g. high-quality recipe sites) but no mainstream tool supports curating the source pool.
Opportunity
A search tool (web app or browser extension) where users build reusable whitelists of domains and run keyword searches indexed only across those sites — with pre-made shared lists per vertical (recipes, dev docs, medical, news).
Market analysis
The pain is real and widely felt in the AI-slop era, but the core functionality already exists for free inside Google's Programmable Search Engine — it just has terrible UX and no shared-list social layer. The buildable product is a curated-list wrapper with community verticals, not a search engine; the moat would be the shared lists, and crawling/indexing costs are what killed most indie attempts.
Market · Privacy- and quality-conscious power users, researchers, and niche communities (recipes, dev docs, medical); growing frustration with SEO spam is a strong tailwind.
Pricing · Kagi ($5–25/mo) proves willingness to pay for better search; a realistic entry is free tier + $3–5/mo for saved/shared lists and unlimited verticals.
Pros
- + Genuine, fast-growing pain: AI slop is degrading general search for everyone.
- + MVP can ride existing infrastructure (Programmable Search Engine JSON API or an API like Exa/Brave) instead of crawling.
- + Shared vertical lists create community lock-in and organic distribution.
Cons
- − Google Programmable Search Engine already does whitelisted search for free, just with poor UX.
- − Running your own crawl/index for a solo builder is expensive and thankless.
- − API-based search resells (Exa, Brave) have per-query costs that eat margin at consumer prices.
Existing / similar tools
Source
r/Doesthisexist (Reddit)
The uncomfortable truth is that the feature already ships inside Google’s own Product — create a Programmable Search Engine, restrict it to your domain list, done. Nobody uses it that way because the UX is buried and the results page is ugly, which means the actual product here is curation-as-a-service: pre-vetted vertical lists (“the 40 recipe sites that never disappoint”) maintained and rated by a community. That is a content and trust business wearing a search costume, and it lives or dies on whether the lists stay good once thousands of users start relying on them. The non-obvious risk is economic: every query costs money if you resell an API, so the business only works if query volume per paying user stays low — which is at odds with making search your daily habit.