How online search is changing

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

Most people don’t need a history lesson to know that Google has changed; they feel it. Try searching for a product on your smartphone and you’ll see that what was once a small teal bar featuring one “sponsored link” is now a hard-to-decipher, multi-scroll slog, filled with paid-product carousels; multiple paid-link ads; the dreaded, algorithmically... See more

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.

During the first few decades of the internet, we were taught to search for things in a certain way. We might type in “blue jeans,” for instance, or “black dress.”

Search is changing rapidly, as search gets smarter and more contextual. Observing younger people browse and shop, we see changes in real time. It’s becoming more common to search something... See more

People do care about privacy, but the sacrifices we make for privacy must come at a low enough cost that we will make them. As DuckDuckGo has improved its product, more people have used it. The combination of increasing awareness of the issue of data privacy combined with better user experiences for privacy-focused competitors will drive us all to ... See more