We take it for granted now that we can go to Wikipedia and read about how the U.S. Political System works with no hassle at all, but not too long ago, information was a lot harder to obtain. The gutenberg press wasn’t invented until the 1400s, and before that, it was a lot harder to find copies of important books and content that you wanted to read.
They really underserve blogs. There used to be a specific search field for blogs and they actually got rid of it. Unfortunate since decent blogs are really pretty high-content content. I almost wonder if that is why they did it. Blogs are also dying, perhaps for other reasons (e.g. Twitter, which sucks, but oh well). But I wonder if Google had a role.
Why did the web directories fail? Just easier to search than to browse? Could we automate the construction of directories by clustering and classifying a search database? What might that look like? There's also the question of centralized vs decentralized.
So much innovation could happen here. Just hard to compete with "free".
Good read. I put this article in our newsletter.
Memo to myself: https://share.glasp.co/kei/?p=LiNgUqueG2NoK2o5m3QZ
They really underserve blogs. There used to be a specific search field for blogs and they actually got rid of it. Unfortunate since decent blogs are really pretty high-content content. I almost wonder if that is why they did it. Blogs are also dying, perhaps for other reasons (e.g. Twitter, which sucks, but oh well). But I wonder if Google had a role.
Thanks, I've enjoyed your analysis.
Why did the web directories fail? Just easier to search than to browse? Could we automate the construction of directories by clustering and classifying a search database? What might that look like? There's also the question of centralized vs decentralized.
So much innovation could happen here. Just hard to compete with "free".