There’s an emergence of tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise where people are aggregating content and resources, reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs - hidden in private or semi-private corners of the Internet, fragmented, poorly indexed, and unavailable for public use. We haven’t figured out how to make them multiplayer. In cases where we’ve made them public and collaborative - here is a great example - these projects are often short-lived and poorly maintained. The stated mission of a company worth almost two trillion dollars is to “organize the world’s information” and yet the Internet remains poorly organized. Or, stated differently, in a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information. It’s hard to believe, but one of Google’s main problems, once it got going, was that there just wasn’t much to see online. Having a great search engine is useless if somebody types in “how to grow an herb garden” and the answer doesn’t exist online. With the advent of Google AdWords, it became profitable to put out low-quality content that passed as informative and filled Google’s search engine results. The end result is that the websites at the top of Google are not necessarily the highest-quality ones, but rather the ones that put the most effort into SEO. What started as a well-intentioned way to organize the world’s information has turned into a business focusing most of its resources on monetizing clicks to support advertisers, rather than focusing on delivering trusted search results for people.
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