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... See more

At Startupy we’re building a boutique search engine for startup insights and the people and companies that have them. You can think of us as a digital playground where thinkers and creators curate, organize, map, and interconnect the world's most valuable insights and ideas.

Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility. It’s not wrong to say there is a market for this kind of curation. What people miss, though, is that this market is already captured by Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.

There’s an emergence of tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise where people are aggregating content and resources, reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs, hidden in private or semi-private corners of the Internet, fragmented, poorly indexed, and unavailable for public use. We haven't figured out how to make... See more

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.

It has become popular to say we live in the information age, and we need curation to help us sort through the mess. But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. We seem to have accepted the job of the curator as providing a product review, a list of links, a song... See more

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.

The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and towards more goal-oriented interfaces. People should be able to find whatever content they want on their terms and not be beholden to when the curator decides to publish.

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