"The Future of Search Is Boutique: Truth, Context, and Social Media"

"The Future of Search Is Boutique: Truth, Context, and Social Media"

We are far from achieving the grand vision of the Internet. The project of human knowledge, as it stands today, is a vast ocean of ephemeral and fragmented information and ideas, with the best sources near-impossible to find. We need more interfaces with a point of view on what information is missing, how it needs to be organized, and at what point of the value chain the curation has to happen.

This is why subscriptions present an opportunity. Subscription simplifies the network effects to two sides: content as supply, a paying audience as demand. But subscription itself is not a panacea, especially when the use cases are not frequent enough. How often are you needing to find a freelancer? An investor? If use cases are not frequent enough, the utility of a search engine won’t translate to a sustainable business model and you’ll have to come up with your own flavor of “come for the search, stay for something else.”

Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like the 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 also introduce new business models that don’t rely on advertising.

Searchable, curated interfaces will help us move away from ephemeral, time-bound feeds into contextual, high-signal, trustworthy knowledge spaces. Because searchable interfaces are densely linked, an explorer can follow multiple trails through the content, rather than being dumped into a “most recent” feed. The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and toward 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.

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, or a song recommendation — all inside linear structures and chronological feeds designed to surface the ideas of the last 24 hours, not to accumulate and surface knowledge as needed.

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. 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. Having a great search engine is useless if somebody types in “how to grow an herb garden” and the answer doesn’t exist online. 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. 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. 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 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.

Moving on to the topic of social media, one of my great frustrations with it today is that it’s so hard to zoom out and gain an appreciation for the complexity of a given topic. Short, Tweet-like posts constrain observations to these micro-squares, stripping them of context and nuance.

We went from the book to the blog to the tweet; the movie to the YouTube episode to the TikTok video. We’re all reporting the picture as we see it, but we each see such a small slice. Some of us who have spent far more energy—years or decades, maybe—in understanding a thing might have uncovered more of the picture, but even then, every perspective has blind spots.

"The Future of Search Is Boutique: Truth, Context, and Social Media" highlights the need for curated and contextual search engines that go beyond the current model of linear structures and chronological feeds. Boutique search engines, with their constrained supply and focus on trust, have the potential to deliver high-quality, goal-oriented search experiences that prioritize the user's needs.

In order to achieve this future of search, there are three actionable advice that can be taken:

1. Embrace curated interfaces: Move away from never-ending-now feeds and prioritize curated content that accumulates and surfaces knowledge as needed. This will allow users to find relevant content on their terms and not be limited by the timing of the curator's publishing decisions.

2. Focus on organizing trustworthy information: Rather than simply organizing all information available, prioritize the organization of trustworthy information. This will help combat the issue of low-quality content and ensure that search results deliver trusted and reliable information to users.

3. Expand the perspective: In the realm of social media, encourage a zoomed-out view that appreciates the complexity of a given topic. Avoid reducing observations to short, context-stripped posts and instead promote deeper understanding and nuanced discussions.

By implementing these actionable advice, we can move towards a future where search engines and social media platforms provide meaningful and valuable information, curated for the user's needs and delivered with context and trust. The future of search is boutique, with an emphasis on truth, context, and the exploration of diverse perspectives.