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

What started as a well-intentioned way to organize the world’s information has turned into a business focusing most of its resources on monetizing clicks to support advertisers rather than focusing on the search experience for people.

There’s an emergence of tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise where people are aggregating content and resources, reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs, hidden in private or semi-private corners of the Internet, fragmented, poorly indexed, and unavailable for public use. We haven't figured out how to make the... 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 opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and towards more goal-oriented interfaces. People should be able to find whatever content they want on their terms and not be beholden to when the curator decides to publish.

At Startupy we’re building a boutique search engine for startup insights and the people and companies that have them. You can think of us as a digital playground where thinkers and creators curate, organize, map, and interconnect the world's most valuable insights and ideas.

we need more Boutique Search Engines

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

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

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.