Yeah the comments in this thread are baffling (or they didn't read the 100 character tweet lol). The tweet is just describing domain specific database-like websites. Have people not heard of allrecipes.com? Yummly? Or one of the other thousands of recipe db sites? No blogspam, just structured recipe search. You can even search by ingredient!

Mayo clinic, Harvard health, and pubmeb do a great job with health info. IMDb for movies, Goodreads for books, *gearlab.com for reviews, booking.com for accomodations.

I think the biggest threat to Google isn't a better general search engine, it's user behavior switching to more domain-specific websites as the top of the funnel. E.g. people going directly to Amazon to search for products instead of first searching Google.

To some extent, Google has figured this out, which is why they now have a dedicated flight search, hotel search, product search (Google shopping still exists and it's pretty good!), etc.

Wow so that's completely opposite of my feelings on this topic. I would never, ever use Expedia for travel search over Google flights/hotels. Google travel is the meta-search engine for this vertical. Expedia etc. are all-in on spam and scams, trying at every opportunity to take an extra dollar from you.

The same with Amazon. You'd think that with all the armchair search quality experts cropping up lately there might be more vocal complaints about the fact that Amazon's own search can't find basic consumer products sold by Amazon itself. If I want to find stuff on Amazon, I search Google for it.

Except almost all of these aren't search engines, but their own walled gardens. You can't search for an item on Ebay and find a link to the product's Amazon page, for example.