Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like yellow pages, and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommendation. They have constrained supply, which is the foundation for their biggest moat - trust. Importantly, boutique search engines introduce new business models that don’t rely on advertising.

DuckDuckGo is a free, privacy-focused search engine which is one take on that and does 100M search queries daily and has roughly a 2% share in the search market in the US. It does also have a keyword-based ad model, but does not personalize or target search results or ads other than based on the search term.

When you think about search, you think about finding useful results. As

Ed Zitron has documented

, when today's executives think about search, they think about making money from search. Whether you find what you're looking for has become incidental at best.