philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Curation is the New Search is the New Curation

(Philip Lelyveld comment: I've been developing a lecture on the dark side of search engines.  This editorial came along just in time to give me a much more positive ending to the story.)

In the beginning there was curation, and it was good. People found interesting things on the web, created directories of those things, and then you found what you were looking for inside those curated lists. That was the origins of the original lists and directories, from Yahoo on outward.

But then that got too hard. The web got bigger faster than anyone could keep track. Curation steadily gave way to algorithmic search, which at first was just spidering of the web, and then more intelligent spidering with keywords. And then it became Google, with ranking algorithms that placed websites into a hierarchies of keyword-related relevance based on things like authoritativeness, as defined, in part, by links from other sites -- by those original hand-curated lists, ironically enough.

That model has now begun to give way too. Any algorithm can be gamed; it's only a matter of time. The Google algorithm is now well and thoroughly gamed...

Google has, they argue, lost its mojo -- which is true, but it's more interesting and complicated than that.

Read the full post here.