Folk search engines

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

This very email is an example of this. This theory is being shared on a private channel sent to 500 people who I know or who have explicitly chosen to receive it. This is the... See more

Google Search is, of course, an extraordinarily useful product. But there are an increasing number of search use cases where Google falls short. If you’ve been in crypto for a while, you probably primarily use Twitter to get the day’s news, and a mix of Twitter, Medium, Substack, and podcasts to learn about new technologies. You probably rarely use... See more

For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?”.

The evidence is ev... See more

Paul Graham:  This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam?

To build the next big search engine simply focus on people. It’s why people add “reddit” to their queries and prefer to search social — we want to see results from humans, not soulless SEO farms.