The Future of Search

The future of search may be vertical through high-quality curated buckets, in-cura-net, that makes the most use of interest graph and social graph.

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I believe that one of the noblest pursuits is for people to learn, experience, and pass their knowledge on to future generations. It’s simply inspiring and stimulating.

Curiosity is a natural desire that drives us to know or learn something. It is a sustained desire that we have inherently. I’m not sure if Google exists for the next 100 years but I’m certainly sure that people will still be searching the Internet (or anything equivalent) for information even after 100 years.

And people have the nature of loss aversion. We don’t want to waste the time we have spent. That may be why people curate. By collecting things that you think are important and useful and putting them in a bucket (I call it a curated bucket), you are more likely to be able to access what you want more quickly in the future if you search for it from there.

In fact, curation and search are close and related to each other. Curate what you have searched for, and search in the future from the curated bucket. In an information-overload era, it may be a natural flow for people to do: (1) generic search from the Internet, (2) curate important parts and (3) search from the curated bucket.

When considering access to necessary information from the curated bucket later, the quality and scope of the bucket are two important aspects.

Okay, how can we maintain the quality of the curated bucket? I think the reason why Pocket and other similar apps tend to become a graveyard of links is that they accumulate everything, and the curated bucket will no longer function as an important place, making it less valuable to search in the future. A read-it-later app is a temporary repository of information as its name says, and it might be hard for them to become a real curated bucket where you search for the information you need in the future. But it’s okay because it’s the job that those apps are hired for.

The quality could be maintained by using social accountability associated with public aspects. Social bookmarking tools may have been born from this background. However, since the curated content is 0 or 100 (only title or full text), it lacks a way to extract and access important information.

Since the way people organize information is often different from the way they actually search for it, people do not or cannot search for information in the same way that they have accumulated and organized it, especially when the volume of information is enormous. When you search for information, you might be searching with certain keywords or a sequence of words. In this respect, “highlight” may be a more suitable unit in terms of accessing only the important parts of the information and for search. Thus, public highlight could take the good parts of both: social accountability and specific important parts. This may ensure the quality of the curated bucket.

Also, when we search for something, it may be more effective to separate the scope into vertical or narrow it down because the scope is directly related to the signal-noise ratio. In the case of note-taking apps, meeting notes, diaries, thoughts, ideas, learnings, books, videos, and so on are all included, so it may be hard to separate the necessary information into the effective scope size. While it may be effective in organizing information, it may increase the noise in searching because it expands the scope of the search. Think about it. There are tons of note-taking apps out there but why are people still looking for or excited about the new ones? I’m curious if it’s a matter of information organization or search. Separating let’s say only for online learning would be a way to keep the scope size manageable.

The above is about an individual case, but what happens when the range of the curated bucket is expanded … to the public? It would be interesting to assume that the quality of everyone’s curated buckets has increased due to social accountability and highlight.

Taking private and public aspects into consideration, I guess the scope of search could be separated into the following ones:

• My curated bucket (Myself)
• 1st Connection’s Curated Buckets (friends, following, etc)
• 2nd Connection’s Curated Buckets (friends’ friends, etc)
• 3rd Connection’s Curated Buckets (community, org, etc)
• Global (The Internet)

I’d call the global one “The Internet” and all the private ones “Intranet”. And as the word curate and curious are derived from the same Latin word, cura (care), I’d call the rest of the public ones “In-cura-net”. Internet, In-cura-net, Intranet.

If one can access information from the In-cura-net, the curator can help other people and the creator’s work can be resurfaced. If each person accumulates high-quality information in their curated bucket, it may be possible to find better and more relevant information by searching from the collection of the curated bucket.

Also, people are social creatures, and they trust the recommendations of people they know and trust the most. They are also curious about what others are doing. Having In-cura-net would be fun and meaningful for some people.

The difference between In-cura-net and Yahoo!, a web directory-based search engine at the time, is “people”. You can see who curated the information. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines basically use one’s interest graph, but in the case of In-cura-net, you can use an interest graph & social graph to search for information.

Even if In-cura-net is established, Google search will still exist, and it is probably necessary. However, considering the fact that collective learning is how humans got smarter, it may be possible to reach more relevant information by searching through In-cura-net, a curated bucket of trusted people, in some cases. It also could be one’s proof of existence and a way to contribute to human knowledge history.

The future of search may be vertical through high-quality curated buckets, in-cura-net, that makes the most use of interest graph and social graph. Let’s see how far we can go.

(Thoughts as of May 13, 2022)

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See you next time,

Kazuki