Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why We Need More Boutique… — Mirror

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

But here too, relevance depends on the sociology of the current moment. For example, on Behance, the online creative community, school and location are featured prominently as filters, implying that where you live and where you went to school is an important indicator of the quality of your design portfolio. In a world where talent is being decoupl... See more

Curators, Curators

It has become popular to say we live in the information age, and we need curation to help us sort through the mess. But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. We seem to have accepted the job of the curator as providing a product review, a list of links, a... See more

When you monetize via ads, curation takes a backseat to featuring advertisers - there is just less digital real estate available to curate your own recommendations - so these platforms end up making ethically dubious design choices that generate massive trust gaps.

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

Vertical Search Aggregators

Google is a great example of how the internet enabled scale and speed: every page on the web returned in an instant. But increasingly, we’re seeing this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance. Someone who wants to find the best freelance designer, or the best sushi restaurant, or the best NFT to buy wi... See more

Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility. It’s not wrong to say there is a market for this kind of curation. What people miss, though, is that this market is already captured by Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.

There is no search architecture that will work universally across all categories. It’s hard to imagine you wanting the same UX to search for recipes than to search for freelancers. Whereas Google’s product begins and ends with a search bar, trading off functionality for simplicity, vertical search players like Yelp, Expedia, Zillow, and Behance eme... See more

The solution is better search and better curation, all wrapped in a better business model - a combination I call boutique search engines.