Saved by sari
Interview with Neeva
Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like yellow pages, and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommendation. They have constrained supply, which is the foundation for their biggest moat - trust. Importantly, boutique search engines introduce new business models that don’t rely on advertising.
Sari Azout • Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why We Need More Boutique… — Mirror
the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to “abandon work on efficient journeys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want”... See more
The Man Who Killed Google Search
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.
Sari Azout • Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why We Need More Boutique… — Mirror
This is how I put it in the February 22, 1999, issue of Newsweek: “Google, the Net’s hottest search engine, draws on feedback from the web itself to deliver more relevant results to customer queries.”