It’s hard to imagine wanting to use the same UX to search for recipes as to search for freelancers. There is no search architecture that will work universally across all categories. Someone who wants to find the best freelance designer, or the best sushi restaurant, or the best NFT to buy will not find the answer on Google. But, increasingly, we’re seeing that this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance. Google is a great example of how the internet enabled scale and speed: every page on the web returned in an instant. 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. For the vast majority of people, allowing them to “control their own data” is not a selling point, especially if it requires paying for something they’re used to getting for free. But protection of privacy is not a compelling enough reason to leave Google. Rather than crawling and indexing things their own way, they sit on top of existing data sources and position themselves as privacy-focused alternatives to Google. with my limited time and attention.Īudacious teams, like DuckDuckGo and Neeva, are trying to compete with Google head-on by building massive horizontal search engines. The problem, now so drastically different from a decade ago, is not what to read/buy/eat/watch/etc., but figuring out the best thing to read/buy/eat/watch/etc. 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 delivering trusted search results for people. The end result is that the websites at the top of Google are not necessarily the highest-quality ones, but rather the ones that put the most effort into SEO. With the advent of Google AdWords, it became profitable to put out low-quality content that passed as informative and filled Google’s search engine results. Having a great search engine is useless if somebody types in “how to grow an herb garden” and the answer doesn’t exist online. It’s hard to believe, but one of Google’s main problems, once it got going, was that there just wasn’t much to see online. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information. Or, stated differently, in a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. 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. In cases where we’ve made them public and collaborative - here is a great example - these projects are often short-lived and poorly maintained. We haven’t figured out how to make them multiplayer. 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. There’s an emergence of tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise where people are aggregating content and resources, reviving the curated web. I find enormous value in small, niche, often forgotten sites like Spaghetti Directory. When I’m researching a new product, I type “X item reddit” into Google. We hack Twitter with the “ what is the best ” posts over and over again. These days, I find myself suppressing the garbage Internet by searching on Google for “Substack + future of learning” to find the best takes on education. 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?” įor most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. This is an edited version of a post that originally ran here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |