Maybe Yahoo's time has come again! Maybe Google's decline started when they no longer had competition from Yahoo?
The interesting thing would be coming up with a sustainable business model for it. One way might be the users pay for it, either per-search or per-month. This way the incentives to provide good search results align with the interests of the people doing the searching, not the people being searched.
The people who want to be searched would have an incentive to make a quality site that the search service would believe would please their customers.
I can think of people willing to pay for quality searches - professionals looking for things they need, like programmers, lawyers, researchers, etc.
>The interesting thing would be coming up with a sustainable business model for it.
Even though I loathe ads, I wouldn't mind one simple, clearly designated ad spawned from keywords in the search. No tracking and no cross site linking. No result promoting, etc...
And yes, I believe that the current iteration of the web requires human moderation to be usefully searched.
