The Future of Search Is Boutique

The conversation around curation has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure.

Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility.

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.

• Searchable, curated interfaces will help us move away from ephemeral, time-bound feeds into contextual, high-signal, trustworthy knowledge spaces.
• 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.

Over and over again, curation sites fall into an existential trap. They start with high-quality, curated recommendations.

As they grow, they scale with crowdsourcing, often filling the gap with scraping. The line between curator, compiler, and cataloguer is thin.

A natural invisible asymptote - diminishing returns on more data over time

• Platforms like Twitter delegate this responsibility to their users, who have to go through a long and arduous process of following a huge number of people to ultimately arrive at a self-curated timeline that mimics their interests.
• Some centralize their curation, while others stay away from curation in favor of more traditional crowdsourcing.

The project of human knowledge, as it stands today, is a vast ocean of 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.