There is a legitimate start-up that basically is outsourcing tasks to a digital personal assistant but they log all questions and their researched answers. It make take a while but they will have a moat within a few years with a really robust repository.
That's definitely one way to do it. Our approach is not to literally run a concierge search engine, but rather build up intuitions on how humans effectively find knowledge on the Web and then build tools to make that easier. Is that the end-game of the startup you mentioned?
How can users be sure that "results" aren't sponsored?
I imagine that whoever runs such a service would get hounded by paid placement opportunities if it takes off. A similar issue plagues browser extension devs.