If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of search result domains is a high value feature and are willing to pay for it, the feature has done its job.
If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of search result domains is a high value feature and are willing to pay for it, the feature has done its job.
[0] I wrote a more detailed comment on why a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294800