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

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 stated mission of a company worth almost two trillion dollars is to “organize the world’s information” and yet the Internet remains poorly organized. Or, stated differently, in a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information.

There is no search architecture that will work universally across all categories. It’s hard to imagine you wanting the same UX to search for recipes than to search for freelancers. Whereas Google’s product begins and ends with a search bar, trading off functionality for simplicity, vertical search players like Yelp, Expedia, Zillow, and Behance eme... See more

The solution is better search and better curation, all wrapped in a better business model - a combination I call boutique search engines.

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.

we need more Boutique Search Engines

For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?”.

The evidence is ev... See more

There are tens of thousands of people sharing insights on a long-tail of topics, but their content is buried in the deep corners of the interwebs, found only by chance, and consumed in fleeting social media feeds that strip context and discourage reflection.

If you want to know what the smartest people have to say about the future of fandom, there i... 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.