Discoverability (continued...)

[Image: search]The internet is really just a big jumble of information, and the only way things are really tied together is with search.

Yahoo! was the first to do it and Google was the first to make it cool, but searching online is nowhere near as good as it needs to be if it’s really the only way to get around.

More and more the internet has become a place where we expect that everything exists - generally speaking, if there’s a question, someone, somewhere, at some point, has posted the answer in little digital bits. The problem is finding it.

Blogs are the next step in making things discoverable. Little, personal funnels of information and opinion that, if carefully surfed, can get you practically anywhere.

But the problem is that blogs don’t have a good discovery mechanism themselves. The vast majority of the blogs that I read turned up in my feedreader (or rather, my bookmark toolbar, since I’ve stopped using a feedreader) because someone told me about them.

I’m all for personal recommendations, but how sad is it that the number one discovery method for things online is offline?

What is there besides search?

Directories. Portals. High profile pages (blogs or news sites). But the internet isn’t like music, where you have a (reasonably) manageable category - anyone can throw up a new site anytime (and people frequently do).

Yahoo! tried to keep the web directoried for ages. They still have a directory, but it’s not their main vehicle anymore. There’s the DMOZ, but they’ve got some werid restrictions and copyright issues that keep some sites off the list. And anyway who wants to browse the web by directories? Not me.

So what we probably need is a massively huge Amazon.com for web sites, where each site has their own little spot in the database, complete with “people who liked this site also liked this one”, a little summary and screenshot, and mini-reviews from like-minded sojourners.

Think that’s the next step in search?