Google search and Wikipedia in particular are great examples of how the internet has enabled immense scale and speed: every crawlable page on the web, every sufficiently noteworthy topic, etc, returned to you within a second. But choosing the extreme end of scale is at odds with the key property of personal knowledge management: relevance. A scient... See more

“Most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust,” Brereton argued, therefore “we resort to using Google, and appending the word ‘reddit’ to the end of our queries.” Brereton cited Google Trends data that show that people are searching the word reddit on Google more than ever before.

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?”