Folk search engines

The resulting product, despite its good intentions, is a search engine that surfaces websites that were written to be optimized for a search engine. You are not the audience; the algorithm is.

“I found a piece you wrote in the footnote of a book that I admire.” In other words, it took effort for us to find each other. And much like an inefficient light bulb gives off heat, folk search algorithms have the byproduct of context.

In the end, maybe that’s the only definition of authenticity that doesn’t fall apart under close inspection: not a... See more

Filtering my search for chana masala recipes by “.edu” domains, for example, may not make much intuitive sense, but does have the accidental effect of returning recipes that were not optimized within an inch of their life.