The End of Search, The Beginning of Research

Users have grown accustomed to tailoring their searches by platform for better results and more personalized answers: Amazon for products, Depop for secondhand clothing, Yelp for restaurants, YouTube for tutorials, Reddit for personal anecdotes. Where does that leave Google and the future of a centralized search engine?

the power is in the search, not the discovery. She told me, “Our ability to do these searches has the effect of holding up a mirror to a human and saying, Look in that mirror. Compared to something else out there, you are all the same. We humans are all the same.”

The search firms don’t need to hire the analysts and librarians who have traditionally categorized and filtered information for the benefit of others.

Algorithmic Blindspots:

We find growth while searching for other things. Algorithms give us exactly what we want on demand, so we never need to search, and never find what we never knew we needed.