I think what you're doing with Breeze seems interesting, but the value-add of making it a commercial offering isn't clear; what does it offer that anyone else can't easily replicate with Google Custom Search? I'm not saying that there isn't a value add, I'm only saying that it isn't obvious as a user.

Something has to be a scarce resource; my guess is that the resource here is "labor" in building the CSE parameters and finding the sites to add to collections. Perhaps the effort that went into this should be emphasized.

Are there plans to move things server-side? Making client-side requests to Google has privacy implications.

tl;dr -- working on improving client-side privacy protection & there's couple of other options that may permit using Google with a slight bit of user config; premium version is all server-side since proxied via Bing, Gigablast &/or our index; there's an alt premium option that would basically proxy google via a cloud browser, say browserling or KASM or similar

1. The client-side will be set to no personalized ads -- just found out about a fairly hidden setting that permits that -- should be changed / live later today

2. Google's API precludes making server-side unless user configs an account which we can then drop in, since limited to 10K queries / day to do anything meaningful custom or full web; we're planning to do that as blog post as intermediate alt

3. We've started to instrument if client-side calls sidestep any privacy -- those results / protections are necessarily limited, however, we can perhaps uncover some things if anything in their client-side code that is privacy revealing & possibly mitigate some

4. premium is server-side with proxy to {ahrefs*, Bing, Gigablast, etc.} OR our Breeze index -- we scrape inventory-sensitive / time-sensitive sites, e.g., used car dealer pages

5. given enough ad or other revenue, we could alternatively give everyone a Bing proxy like DDG or other services -- bit too bootstrapped to do that out of the gate, plus Bing has more constraints on custom search, so that's a mixed bag of outcomes

6. another approach, also necessarily premium, would be to proxy through a service like browserling for Google searches, since the API doesn't permit it at scale

7. premium also includes alerts, especially for things like say car dealer pages that are more time sensitive and harder to config than what free google alerts do

if added anything else, it's that we're positioning Breeze more as a search client + search engine, e.g., we use Google, Bing, etc. for webw-wide (search client) whereas we scrape car dealer pages for real-time alerts of inventory (search engine)

that same search client philosophy also why we're adding a low-code query builder so that anyone can build a really extended query, aka, custom search engine, and either keep private for their use or share with community, since we can't possibly build all the CSEs ourselves

in that sense, our long-term trajectory is about building what amounts to a deep reddit, where people can search sites / topics of interest in very direct ways that are way more substantive than wrestling Bing / Google

that's also why we're shifting away from /topics at the top of our site to integrating the branches / filters / custom queries directly into the search experience, e.g., blogs is first one we've done that with that's not easily available elsewhere, and podcasts is likely next.

tl;dr -- free version makes it easy for anyone to build, use & share custom searches; premium version is zero ads + better web alerts + easier access to alt web indexes

1. average user unlikely to go through config of custom search

2. even if they did, it's so poorly documented & finicky, they'd be unlikely to achieve comparable outcome

3. Bing CSE is even worse -- requires Azure account, limited to 400 up/down boosts, etc.

4. there's other technical reasons a user might not do more than a couple, along with the sheer scale issues that also mentioned

5. we're refactoring how the topic searches are experienced and making the topics, which we call branches, a more natural part of search experience

6. "blogs" is the first one to be done that way -- you can filter to just blogs after searching for X - any other branches / topics will be added in that way

7. e.g., podcasts & RSS feeds are coming out soon, along with more traditional filters such as shopping

8. that approach also makes it easy for us to expose what we're calling a low-code builder to let anyone build a custom search and either share / make public or keep private

9. that includes all possible filters - advanced keyword combos, site inclusion / exclusion, URL patterns, schema structure, etc.

10. premium for users includes zero ads, alerts, and some other features that are mix of TBD or too early to build

11. premium for teams includes similar things, along with the ability to config dashboards of searches, e.g., an HR dashboard of relevant custom searches, etc.

12. we're navigating that labor balance -- e.g., the blogs filter is fairly basic atm, whereas filtering college scholarships was a bit more nuanced to make it work