Folk search engines

I believe the opportunity in search is not to attack Google head-on with a massive, one size fits all horizontal aggregator, but instead to build boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways.

When you think about search, you think about finding useful results. As

Ed Zitron has documented

, when today's executives think about search, they think about making money from search. Whether you find what you're looking for has become incidental at best.

The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t ... See more

If search giants aren't interested in, well, search, I suppose it's time to look elsewhere for answers online. Share sources you trust, curate sources of information on what's important to you and dive back into specific URLs over general queries.

People have become sophisticated searchers. They know that they need to refine the search when they see content that just doesn’t seem right. And refine it they will. That means they’ll put in a word or phrase to filter out the “un-you” content. The trick? You need to know the keywords they’ll use, and you need to make sure you include those distin

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The problem, now so drastically different from a decade ago, is not what to read/buy/eat/watch/etc but what is the best thing to read/buy/eat/watch/etc with my limited attention.

Audacious teams, like DuckDuckGo and Neeva, are trying to compete with Google head-on by building massive horizontal search engines. Rather than crawling and indexing thing... See more