And now it's 2011, and Google's not the secure fortress it once was. "Any algorithm can be gamed; it's only a matter of time," writes Kedrosky. "The Google algorithm is now well and thoroughly gamed... It no longer has lists to draw and, on its own, it no longer generates
the same outperformance -- in part because it is, for practical
purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an
adaptive content landscape." Kedrosky goes on to say, memorably, that "it has turned search back into
something like it was in the dying days of first-generation algorithmic
search, like Excite and Altavista: results so polluted by spam that you
often started looking at results only on the second or third page--the
first page was a smoking hulk of algo-optimized awfulness."
What's the answer? Oh, God, what will we do? Kedrosky suggests that to see the future, we may have to look to the past; that all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again; basically, that the beginning is the end is the beginning. Specifically, he says: "We could get better algorithms, which is happening to some degree, with
search engines like Blekko and others. Or, we could head back to
curation, which is what I see happening."
He goes on:
The re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one
people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or
unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation
(JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that
sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being
mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A
sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of
Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a
new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will
continue, over and over.
In short, curation is the new search. It's also the old search. And it's happening again, and again.
In the interest of added value, here's that last excerpt again, this time with helpful links provided by The Atlantic Wire.
The re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one
people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or
unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation
(JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that
sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being
mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A
sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of
Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a
new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will
continue, over and over.
In short, curation is the new search. It's also the old search. And it's happening again, and again.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.