UnMixed Motives

Perhaps most importantly, Google is not necessarily incentivized to optimize ranking for UGC. Ranking a Tweet more highly will funnel more web traffic to Twitter, a direct competitor to Google in the market for ad spend.

Second, the quality of UGC is measured in the same way as all other content when being ranked by Google. [6, 7] But the way we, the searchers, assess the quality of UGC is fundamentally different than how we assess the quality of a static website. The proxies for quality of UGC are follower count, likes, and shares. We’ll also likely consider the u... See more

First off, user-generated content (UGC) is unlikely to be SEO-optimized, so it’s less likely to show up highly ranked in search results.

Google is extraordinarily good at answering the “what is this thing?” question. It’s less good at answering the “what do the people who know about the thing think about it?”

Google Search is, of course, an extraordinarily useful product. But there are an increasing number of search use cases where Google falls short. If you’ve been in crypto for a while, you probably primarily use Twitter to get the day’s news, and a mix of Twitter, Medium, Substack, and podcasts to learn about new technologies. You probably rarely use... See more

The next wave of aggregators are owned by their stakeholders, and have the potential to create superior stakeholder experiences as a result. A decentralized search engine could be owned by searchers and publishers, who could thus prioritize their interests over those of advertisers or some detached corporate entity.

I believe that new primitives introduced by web3 and decentralized networks will bring about a new kind of search engine that is more transparent, equitable, private, and useful to the web’s stakeholders.

While Google has helped many smaller publishers increase their distribution, its domination of the advertising market has also put them at risk of extinction.